Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
We’ve been talking a lot about meta-ethics in other threads lately. I had planned a while back to eventually start a thread about my own meta-ethical system, but since my last thread on my principles of commensurablism basically turned entirely into a discussion just about the implications on that, I thought I would instead start a thread about the meta-ethical possibilities generally, and why I fall where I do among them. I hope and expect that this will lead eventually into a discussion about philosophy of language more generally, as that’s where my thoughts had to go to figure my way out of the apparent trap that the usual span of meta-ethical options left me in.
Wikipedia has a great breakdown of common meta-ethical positions and how they relate to each other. The rest of this OP is assuming you’re familiar with that, so give it a glance if you’re not
Cognitivism seems like the default position most people start from: moral assertions are the kinds of things that can be true or false. I certainly started out and ended up there myself.
The most common kind of cognitivism seems to be a form of subjectivism, divine command theory (what is good is what god commands). But for those who reject that view, like me, the most obvious alternative seems to be a form of moral realism: there are some facts about reality that make some things moral and other things not.
The most straightforward candidates for such facts, especially for someone like me who had rejected the supernatural generally at the same time as rejecting divine command theory, are natural facts. Most Modern-era normative ethical theories like utilitarianism seem to just assume this, and that seems natural enough (pun intended).
But there are a lot of good arguments like those put forward by the father of meta-ethics, GE Moore, against the possibility of natural facts constituting moral facts; notably the Open Question Argument, which is much akin to Hume’s is-ought problem or the fact-value distinction. Moore thought that this entailed that moral facts must be non-natural; and yet, he was still otherwise a realist.
For those like me whose physicalist ontology cannot admit of some strange non-natural but nevertheless real moral facts, non-naturalism is a non-option. (This is also called the Argument from Queerness: wtf is a non-natural moral fact like?). But together with the defeat of ethical naturalism, that rules out all of moral realism. That puts us back in the subjectivist camp, but without a God to defer to, we’re left with a more ordinary subjectivism, a kind of cultural relativism: what is good is what your culture says is good.
Yet that seems vulnerable to the same Euthyphro-esque attacks as Divine Command Theory: is what culture says is good good just because they say it is? (if so that seems rather arbitrary and unjustified) or do they say it's good because it actually is? (if so then it's not them saying it that makes it good and we're back to where we started: what actually makes it good?). Subjectivism also seems to undermine a lot of the point of cognitivism in the first place: if everybody's differing moral claims are all true relative to themselves, then it doesn't seem like any of them are actually true at all, they're just different opinions, none more right or wrong than the others.
With both realism and subjectivism ruled out, the only cognitivist option left is error theory: everyone is trying to make truth-apt claims when they make their moral assertions, but all of them are categorically false. That seems just patently absurd, though, that everyone categorically are trying but failing to do something with language that just cannot possibly be successfully done. So then it seems much more reasonable that instead, people aren't trying to do that with language at all; they're trying to do something different altogether.
That takes us finally out of cognitivism. The most straightforward kind of non-cognitivism is emotivism, a kind of expressivism which says that rather than making assertions of the kind that can be true or false, moral claims are just expressions of emotions, like "boo this" and "yay that". Like error theory, this ends up effectively a kind of moral nihilism: no moral claims are ever actually right, though unlike error theory, they're not all wrong either, because they're all not even wrong. That, I think, runs counter to most people's impressions of what they're trying to do with moral language, as evidenced by the fact that people actually have moral disagreements where they think that one person is right and the other is wrong.
There are other non-cognitivist possibilities. Some hold moral discourse to be a kind of shared fiction, a projection of our feelings as though they were real facets of the world. That, to me, seems too much like error theory, mixed with some of the flaws of subjectivism: nothing is actually moral, but we agree to pretend like certain things we agree on are actually moral.
There's one other non-cognitivist theory, universal prescriptivism, which holds that moral claims are actually more like imperatives, commands that we're giving each other, but specifically commands that are universalizable: commands that we're committed to issuing and adhering to in all similar circumstances. That one, I think, gets very close to a solution, because in being non-cognitivist it gets around all the problems with those views detailed above, but also escapes the nihilistic implications of other forms of non-cognitivism, and tries to salvage not the robust moral realism we discussed above, but a more minimal moral "realism", a mere moral universalism.
...
I'm going to hold off on discussing where I went from there for now, and let everyone discuss whether all of these conventional options are so far insufficient, and we're in need of something new and different, which is where I found myself before trying to come up with such a new and different option.
It looks to me like we need something that’s compatible with ontological naturalism or physicalism, that honors the is-ought divide, and yet still allows for moral claims to be genuinely truth-apt and not mere subjective opinions — and none of the conventional options above satisfy those conditions.
Wikipedia has a great breakdown of common meta-ethical positions and how they relate to each other. The rest of this OP is assuming you’re familiar with that, so give it a glance if you’re not
Cognitivism seems like the default position most people start from: moral assertions are the kinds of things that can be true or false. I certainly started out and ended up there myself.
The most common kind of cognitivism seems to be a form of subjectivism, divine command theory (what is good is what god commands). But for those who reject that view, like me, the most obvious alternative seems to be a form of moral realism: there are some facts about reality that make some things moral and other things not.
The most straightforward candidates for such facts, especially for someone like me who had rejected the supernatural generally at the same time as rejecting divine command theory, are natural facts. Most Modern-era normative ethical theories like utilitarianism seem to just assume this, and that seems natural enough (pun intended).
But there are a lot of good arguments like those put forward by the father of meta-ethics, GE Moore, against the possibility of natural facts constituting moral facts; notably the Open Question Argument, which is much akin to Hume’s is-ought problem or the fact-value distinction. Moore thought that this entailed that moral facts must be non-natural; and yet, he was still otherwise a realist.
For those like me whose physicalist ontology cannot admit of some strange non-natural but nevertheless real moral facts, non-naturalism is a non-option. (This is also called the Argument from Queerness: wtf is a non-natural moral fact like?). But together with the defeat of ethical naturalism, that rules out all of moral realism. That puts us back in the subjectivist camp, but without a God to defer to, we’re left with a more ordinary subjectivism, a kind of cultural relativism: what is good is what your culture says is good.
Yet that seems vulnerable to the same Euthyphro-esque attacks as Divine Command Theory: is what culture says is good good just because they say it is? (if so that seems rather arbitrary and unjustified) or do they say it's good because it actually is? (if so then it's not them saying it that makes it good and we're back to where we started: what actually makes it good?). Subjectivism also seems to undermine a lot of the point of cognitivism in the first place: if everybody's differing moral claims are all true relative to themselves, then it doesn't seem like any of them are actually true at all, they're just different opinions, none more right or wrong than the others.
With both realism and subjectivism ruled out, the only cognitivist option left is error theory: everyone is trying to make truth-apt claims when they make their moral assertions, but all of them are categorically false. That seems just patently absurd, though, that everyone categorically are trying but failing to do something with language that just cannot possibly be successfully done. So then it seems much more reasonable that instead, people aren't trying to do that with language at all; they're trying to do something different altogether.
That takes us finally out of cognitivism. The most straightforward kind of non-cognitivism is emotivism, a kind of expressivism which says that rather than making assertions of the kind that can be true or false, moral claims are just expressions of emotions, like "boo this" and "yay that". Like error theory, this ends up effectively a kind of moral nihilism: no moral claims are ever actually right, though unlike error theory, they're not all wrong either, because they're all not even wrong. That, I think, runs counter to most people's impressions of what they're trying to do with moral language, as evidenced by the fact that people actually have moral disagreements where they think that one person is right and the other is wrong.
There are other non-cognitivist possibilities. Some hold moral discourse to be a kind of shared fiction, a projection of our feelings as though they were real facets of the world. That, to me, seems too much like error theory, mixed with some of the flaws of subjectivism: nothing is actually moral, but we agree to pretend like certain things we agree on are actually moral.
There's one other non-cognitivist theory, universal prescriptivism, which holds that moral claims are actually more like imperatives, commands that we're giving each other, but specifically commands that are universalizable: commands that we're committed to issuing and adhering to in all similar circumstances. That one, I think, gets very close to a solution, because in being non-cognitivist it gets around all the problems with those views detailed above, but also escapes the nihilistic implications of other forms of non-cognitivism, and tries to salvage not the robust moral realism we discussed above, but a more minimal moral "realism", a mere moral universalism.
...
I'm going to hold off on discussing where I went from there for now, and let everyone discuss whether all of these conventional options are so far insufficient, and we're in need of something new and different, which is where I found myself before trying to come up with such a new and different option.
It looks to me like we need something that’s compatible with ontological naturalism or physicalism, that honors the is-ought divide, and yet still allows for moral claims to be genuinely truth-apt and not mere subjective opinions — and none of the conventional options above satisfy those conditions.
Comments (169)
:brow:
But the rough class of utterances we’re talking about are the kind involving words like “good, bad, moral, immoral, right, wrong, just, unjust, ought(n’t), should(n’t), etc”. As I’m sure you already know.
Well, first moral claims are prescriptive. They tell you what to do. But there are of course different kinds of prescriptions.
Moral claims tell you what to do regardless of your personal goals. This is often referred to as "objective", but the term "objective" has some unfortunate baggage associated. Perhaps it's better to call it "apodictic". Moral claims are prescriptive claims that establish a general duty you should follow.
Where do you think Kant's "freedom through morality" approach falls within meta-ethics?
It's bad, immoral, wrong, and unjust to whack a little old lady in the back of the head with a shovel for no reason whatsoever...
What's the problem here regarding the truth of the above moral claim?
I don’t recall that phrase exactly from Kant, so can you elaborate on that?
I’ve also always had a hard time figuring out Kant’s metaethics. He seems clearly a cognitivist and not an error theorist. It seems plausible that he might either be some kind of universalist subjectivist like an Ideal Observer theorist, or else a non-naturalist realist. It’s really hard to say exactly.
I haven’t given my account of that yet in this thread, only said briefly why I think the conventional accounts fail in one way or another
So "You should drive on the left" is a moral claim?
It's a claim, not about what is the case, but what ought be the case; and it's a claim that applies to everyone, unlike a mere preference. Hence,
Quoting Pfhorrest
...and further this leads to some disagreement as to the moral facts, and hence better to look at virtues rather than moral rules.
My present thinking on the topic.
Forget about moral rules ad look at the person who hits the LOL... what do you make of them? They are telling us who they are by their acts. You tell us about yourself by your reaction to them.
:point:
Quoting Banno
:up:
Kant's "groundwork" doesn't so much start with the question "what should I do" as it starts with the question "how can I be free". The categorical imperative is arrived at as the form of the "general law" that one must follow to be free of the vagaries of circumstance.
Quoting Isaac
It could be. You need the context. But I realize we need another distinction between legal and moral.
Particularists like Jonathan Dancy want to retain the idea that properties like helpfulness and pleasure are morally relevant and hence provide reasons for action, but to dispense with any notion of universalizability. So, properties which provide reasons for an action in one case may not do so in a different case, and might even count as reasons against an action in some cases, like the second one above. Crucial to this move is to give a plausible account of moral properties. Hence, the particularist regards morally relevant properties like pleasure and helpfulness as forming a base for resultant moral properties like "right" and "good". So moral properties as such are resultant properties, and the properties from which moral properties result are all reasons for or against action, depending on the precise circumstances that form the resultance base. In my view, the sophisticated development of an account along these lines gives the best prospect for moral cognitivism / realism.
Interesting. I had forgotten that from Kant, but then separately elsewhere (regarding free will theodicies) come up with a similar thought of my own, that free will is having moral reasoning be causally effective on your behavior, such that thinking that something is what you should do causes you to do that, instead of something else that you didn’t think you should do, which would be unfree will (where your will, that which moves you to act, is not dependent on what you meant for it to be; you are not free to will what you want to will, where wanting to will something and thinking it’s the right thing to do just are the same state of mind).
You also seem eager to reject all forms of moral nihilism. Is that a logical approach or a reflection of your sentimentality?
As moral beings, we quite often derive values from perceived facts. It is the way that we morally reason. I think any meta ethical system needs to recognize this as more than mere error. If morality is a human invention, than the way that humans morally reason must have clout.
Do you think the is-ought distinction is best interpreted as 1) or 2) ?
Thanks!
Some finesse is needed.
A sharp is/ought or fact/value divide is a specifically Humean feature designed to fit Hume's belief-desire theory of motivation. Moral realists undermine this sharp divide both by criticising Hume's own arguments in defence of it and with their observations of how moral reasons operate which entails an account of how moral properties and facts result from the morally relevant features of actions and the circumstances in which they are carried out. Because moral properties are regarded as resultant properties, "right" and "good" are not defined in terms of any natural properties, so the kind of realism being proposed is not vulnerable to the open question argument.
You're welcome!
If moral dialectics are to be subsumed under Kantian transcendental metaphysics and do not themselves start there, they are doomed to be mistaken. Case in point, “freedom through morality” is exactly, unequivocally and catastrophically.......backwards.
Start somewhere else, no problem.
I haven’t completely rejected all non-cognitivist approaches; I think universal prescriptivism is the closest thing to right that I’ve seen. My own view could be called “non-cognitivist” by those who don’t distinguish cognitivism from descriptivism; my view is a non-descriptive cognitivism.
I would like to hear about the nuances you’ve found that I left out here. The meta-ethics I studied in college didn’t have much more than that wikipedia article does about it.
Quoting Adam's Off Ox
It’s a practical constraint. People generally talk and think and act like some moral claims are true and others are false and they try to figure out which is which. Arriving at moral nihilism is tantamount to simply giving up on that endeavor. But we can’t help but be constantly faced with moral questions as we live our lives. Rather than just trying to ignore those questions and by our actions tacitly assume some answer to them, which might be the wrong answer if there are right and wrong answers, practicality behooves us to at least consider the question and try to act in the way that is most probably right, should it turn out that anything is. So any approach that ends up saying there isn’t any answer to be found is for that reason impractical. We need some way of trying to answer moral questions.
Democracy, persuasion, tradition, consequentialism, virtue... It seems we have plenty. Do we need another?
You may as well point at all the different religions’ accounts of the origins of the universe and ask if we really need scientific cosmology to come up with yet another one. Yes, we do, because those ones all have problems.
What would working sufficiently well consist in? Is it the extent of agreement with the answer, the extent to which you agree with it?
Say, hypothetically, we asked the world "should we give a tithe to charity", by vote. The vote was 60/40 in favour of a tithe. Everyone agreed that this is a fine way to decide. Would that then make democratic vote a 'good' method for you?
Working sufficiently well means not being vulnerable to any reasonable criticism. Whether or not a particular solution is vulnerable to any criticism is up to each particular reasoner to evaluate. In my evaluation, there are sound objections to all the things you listed: people have problems with them and I can see why, their reasons for not completely accepting them seem sound to me. That isn’t to say that all of them are completely wrong in every way. A real solution would incorporate the best from all of them while avoiding the problematic parts.
Quoting Isaac
In that particular case where everyone is satisfied, even the 40% who lost the vote, I have no objection there. Generally wherever there is unanimity there is no problem. But that doesn’t mean that every majoritarian vote gives a perfect solution to every moral question. It’s easy to construct scenarios where a majority vote clearly breaks down. (“Two wolves and a sheep...” etc).
In any case, you brought these things up in the context of moral nihilism. To think that any of these actually is morally sufficient is already to reject moral nihilism. Moral nihilism would have it that none of them are and nothing possibly can be sufficient, because the questions are inherently unanswerable.
I was asking about the truth of that claim in direct response to the criterion set forth - for what you claim we need - in the last paragraph of the OP. Particularly, the bit about being 'genuinely' truth-apt, which to me amounts to what sorts of claims are even capable of being true, in addition to what makes them so...
I see no reason for moral claims to be any different than any other claim in this regard. What I do not get is the confusion regarding what the claim means, or what it is saying. What's not to be understood about what the claim means, assuming we are competent language users? We all know what it means, don't we? If we do not, then we've gone horribly wrong somewhere along the lines in our meta-ethical considerations, because we most certainly used to.
My initial question was the beginning of a rather different sort of approach. Seeing how that's what you seem to be asking for, perhaps we can pursue one, at least momentarily; for the sake of argument, so to speak.
All of the different language use that make a claim a moral one as compared to not, have something else in common too. On my view, this other commonality is the determining factor. It is what makes a claim a moral one, conventional examples notwithstanding...
All moral claims - all things moral for that matter - are about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. If being about that is what makes them moral claims, and that's what I'm currently advocating, then that completely leaves behind the personal value judgment aspect, which has some very interesting consequences.
The term "moral" would no longer be being used - on pains of coherency alone - as a value judgement/assessment. Rather, "moral" would be used to pick out things that are about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. This, of course, broadens the scope well beyond where it is and would render moral facts as what's happened and/or is happening that had and/or has to do with acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. True utterances of "ought" would correspond to the moral facts, in the very same way that other true statements correspond to fact. Note here that I'm not using "fact" as a name for true statements. Rather, facts are events; what's happened and/or is happening; the way things were/are.
It's the very meaning of a claim that determines what ought or ought not be the case, just in case we look to see for ourselves, and even in the cases where we do not or cannot. If "the cat is on the mat" is a true statement, then a cat ought be on the mat should we check. If "the red cup is in the cupboard" is a true statement, then a red cup ought be in the cupboard should we check. That's what knowing the truth conditions/meaning for/of some statement amounts to. Why would it be any different for a moral claim?
Take a promise made to plant a rose garden on Sunday. "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday" is incapable of being true/false at the time of utterance, but claims about that promise, or based upon that promise are most certainly capable of being so. For example, if one promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then "there ought be a rose garden on Monday", is true for the exact same reasons that there ought be a red cup in the cupboard.
Meta-ethical questions first arose in response to the logical positivists’ verificationist theory of meaning, which is very similar to what you outline later: a statement’s meaning is what it tells you to expect of the world if you go and investigate it. But moral statements, following the is-ought divide, aren’t telling you what to expect about your experiences of the world. If I hear that something is good, that doesn’t tell me to expect anything in particular about it to be apparently true, or for anything in particular to even appear to exist. You can't get an "is" from an "ought" any more than you can get an "ought" from an "is", so "ought" statements have no implications on what "is".
So are moral statements then meaningless, if verificationism is true? And if not, then what do they mean, if not the same thing as non-moral statements? That's where meta-ethics comes in, trying to answer those kinds of questions.
Quoting creativesoul
"Acceptable/unacceptable" is just another kind of judgement/assessment, so I don't see the difference here. What does it mean for something to be acceptable? We can check the descriptive fact of whether something is accepted, but what observation do we make of a thing to verify its acceptability? Like, describe two things that are exactly identical in all of their features except one is acceptable and the other is not. What's that difference between them like? (This is a rhetorical question, I don't expect you, or anyone, to be able to actually do that).
Quoting creativesoul
In this case, the promise is basically just a future-tense description. "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday" and "I will plant a rose garden on Sunday" have pretty much the exact same content and function: they're impressing upon the listener the belief or expectation that on Sunday I will plant a rose garden. If they believe me when I say that, then they will expect me to plant a rose garden on Sunday, which is the sense of "there ought to be" here: it's expected that there will be.
A lot of moral-ish language also gets used for future-ish descriptions and vice versa, because moral prescription is more often than not about the present and future, while descriptions of reality are more often than not about the present and past, so it's easy to conflate moral with future and real with past. (In my essay On Rhetoric I recently added a bit adapting Aristotle's past-centric "forensic" and future-centric "deliberative" forms of rhetoric into reality-centric and morality-centric forms instead).
But they are distinct purposes, because one can also say prescriptive things about the past and descriptive things about the future. You can say that something ought to have happened yesterday, but didn't; and that something will happen tomorrow, but shouldn't; and so on. So just saying that something will happen, "ought to happen" as in you descriptively expect it to, or you will be surprised if it doesn't, is different from saying that something should happen, ought to happen, as in you prescriptively "expect" it to, or you will disappointed if it doesn't.
Just because you think something is going to happen doesn't mean you think it ought to, and just because you think something ought to happen doesn't mean you think it will.
So the moral philosophy you're advocating is one which seems right to you? Yet if other people advocate a different moral philosophy they're not merely of a different opinion, but they are wrong?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't think any morally sufficient, I'm trying to understand your position, not presenting mine.
There is nothing special about me or moral philosophy in that regard. This is just ordinary judgement and disagreement. On every matter, everyone has to work out to the best of their ability what seem like the right answers to them, in light of all the arguments one way or another, and consequently the alternatives that seem wrong to them too. To disagree with someone just is to think that their opinion is wrong.
"Moral" covers both. It's a difference in criterion and/or taxonomy.
What I was trying to pick apart was the distinction you might make between this "such-and-such moral philosophy seems right to me and so I'm going to go ahead and say it is right", and moral relativism, which essentially says "such-and-such moral behaviour seems right to me so I'm going to go ahead and say that it is right".
You highlighted a need for some systems to arbitrate in the latter case, but no similar need for arbitration in the former?
No, we need and have a system for arbitration in the former case too. That’s what rational argument is all about. We share our reasons and then together try to come up with something that takes into account all of those reasons. That’s precisely why I came up with something other than all the example methods of moral arbitration you gave: they all have some good reasons some bad reasons and arguments against each other highlighting each other’s bad reasons and their own good reasons, and I try to listen to all of those arguments and then creatively figure out what something that takes all of them into account would look like.
Which is completely analogous to the procedure I advocate for resolving moral disagreements, except in the case of meta-ethical or otherwise entirely philosophical disagreements we’re dealing entirely in pure a priori reason, and contingent phenomenal experiences don’t matter, while on my account of resolving ordinary first-order moral disagreement (and ordinary first-order factual disagreements), experiences matter, so other people’s experiences are reasons that need to be accounted for in whatever solution is come up with.
How? What does 'taking into account' a reason actually consist in? Perhaps you could give me an example of someone else's reason (maybe presented in your recent discussions of meta-ethics) and explain what you did to 'take account of it', how has doing so contributed to the 'something' we come up with together?
Quoting Pfhorrest
How are you deciding what is a 'good' argument?
The OP of this very thread is full of them. A chain of reasons to abandon one position and then a new position adopted to account for those reasons and then more reasons that rule that out so some other position adopted to account for those etc. The main point of that OP is “look how there are reasons against all of these conventional meta-ethical views. Let’s discuss what a view that accounts for all of those could be like.”
Quoting Isaac
A sound argument. One that makes valid inferences from true premises.
Of course the truth of the premises could be open to question which then pushes the argument back further, but that’s just how reasoning works.
But these are all your reasons. You seemed to imply that you undertook some process of incorporating and unifying everyone's reasons. What I'm asking about is how you might take a reason you disagree with and nonetheless incorporate it into a meta-ethical theory which 'takes account of' that reason. At the moment, all I have is that your conclusion as to the right meta-ethical theory is the result of a collection of reason which you personally find compelling. You've not suspended your personal feeling about any of the reasons in order to 'take account of' reasons which other people find compelling, you've rejected all reasons which you do not find to be so.
This sounds like no less complex a position than saying that you strongly (almost 100% it seems) believe what seems to you to be the case, and equally strongly disbelieve what it seems to anyone else to be the case.
If that's a reasonable position to hold about meta-ethics, I'm wondering what you find to be different about normative ethics that makes "what's right is what seems to me to be right" unacceptable.
Do you understand the difference?
:brow:
I'm charging convention, both historical and current, with working from an emaciated notion of what counts as being moral in kind. Moral belief are a kind of belief. Moral claims are statements thereof.
All things moral directly involve that which counts as acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. There are no exceptions. That's the strongest justificatory ground possible. If you disagree, then by all means feel free to offer an example. One is all it takes.
This hasn’t been a process of rejecting reasons that go against what I already believe, but of adapting my beliefs to account for more and more reasons. Nowadays I don’t change my beliefs much only because it’s rare that any argument is new to me: I’ve already heard them all and the counter-arguments and followed where the sum of reasons from both sides seemed to lead.
I don’t disagree with that at all, I’m just not sure where you’re going with it in relation to the OP.
Yes, but it's still all about whether you personally find the reasons plausible. What seems to you to be the case. At no point are you taking what seems to someone else to be plausible (but not to you) and saying "well, I'll have to adjust my theory to take account of that, even though it doesn't seem to me to be plausible".
All those reasons that changed your mind did so because they seemed more plausible to you (and that's being as generous as I can to your intellect. We're you an average person, I would be invoking social norms, personal narratives, secondary goals and even mood as additional influences).
What you're suggesting creates an objectively moral 'right' (the right answer to a moral question) is some sort of joint account of what seems to be the case for everyone.
What I'm asking is why you distinguish moral rights for this treatment. It's clearly not the way you handle philosophical rights (the right answer to a philosophical question). Here your judgement is based solely on whether it seems to you to be the case. Others may present their ideas and reasons, but the arbiter of whether you'll consider them objectively 'right' is whether they seem to you to be right.
Extending that approach to morality would indeed lead to normal moral relativism. What's morally right is what seems to you to be right. Others may present reasons for their moral beliefs, but ultimately your sense of credulity is the arbiter.
It is exactly the same. I try to account for everyone’s reasons, but that doesn’t mean trying to simultaneously agree with everyone’s conclusions.
If I am unpersuaded by a philosophical argument, it’s because I think I have already accounted for all the reasons they give in support of their conclusion, and either there is just some apparent invalidity to the argument (while I account for their reasons I don’t see how those reasons entail the conclusion), or I am also taking into account other reasons that they aren’t and coming to a conclusion that accounts for all of them. I never just say “that reason doesn’t matter”; I say how I have already accounted for it, and what else I’m accounting for that they’re not.
Likewise with moral reasoning. Some selfish person may think some thing is good because it avoids pain for them or brings them pleasure, and disregard the suffering it may bring to other people. Those other people may do likewise. I try to account for all of their concerns, all of the suffering or enjoyment they’re aiming for or avoiding, but of course I can’t agree with either of their conclusions because to do so I would have to disregard the concerns of the other party like they do.
Figuring out what exactly would account for all their concerns, or all philosophical reasons, may be a hard creative task, but the solution to that challenge is the thing that I take to be objectively correct. Even if I don’t know what it is yet. Whatever it is that satisfies all those reasons, addresses all those concerns, in science whatever model accounts for all observations, that is the thing that is objectively correct, even if we don’t yet know what that is.
This differentiation between reasons and conclusions, experiences and interpretations, etc, seems to be the most important point that I’m not communicating well enough to you.
Right, so all you've done is kicked the can down the road, now we're talking about your judgement as to whether you've 'accounted' for those reasons or not. It still comes down to your personal judgement. You're still the final arbiter, not any external test. This is what distinguishes ideas about reality from ideas about 'oughts' or metaphysics. I can't believe the wall is not solid, or that I can fly, because it will have such beliefs tested by conflict with reality. You can believe literally any meta-ethical position, literally any moral 'ought' that it is possible for you to imagine and then justify that belief by claiming to have 'taken account of' all the reasons for reaching any contrary conclusion. At no point is your claim to have 'taken account of them' tested or judged externally. You only need to look at this forum as a small example - almost everyone here disagrees with you (this thread, not the forum at large, I wouldn't know about them). The strength of this disagreement has not swayed you in the slightest bit from your position, nor has the strength of the disagreement of literally hundreds of educated and experienced moral philosophers who all disagree with you. So if you're not going to be persuaded by your epistemic peers that you've not 'taken account of' the reason which lead them to alternative conclusions, then the exercise is not remotely comparable to interrogating reality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
With all moral choices one is weighing some harms against some benefits. Taking account of them in this way only gives you the full measure of all the harms and benefits involved. How does it then give you any objective answer to which harms outweigh which benefits? We don't all assign them equal value.
You can believe those things if you refuse to undergo the experiences that would test them and refuse to believe those who say they have undergone such experiences that have refuted them.
Quoting Isaac
It never matters who or how many people agree or disagree with a position, all that matters is the strength of their reasons. All those disagreeing with me are telling me things I already knew and don’t disagree with, so there’s nothing there to change my views. My counter-arguments are presenting what additional reasons I’m also accounting for that they seem not to be. Most of the remaining “arguments” here seem to be about clarifying what exactly is being said, or what the right definitions of words are.
Quoting Isaac
This question is the moral equivalent of epistemology, while what we’ve thus far been discussing is the moral equivalent of ontology. Ontology is about what kinds of things are real, and we’ve thus far been talking about questions of what kinds of things are moral. Epistemology meanwhile is about how to sort out which particular things are most likely to be real given those criteria for what makes something count as real, and this question you’re asking is about how to sort out which particulars things are most likely to be moral given those criteria for what counts as moral. The full answer is long, but the short version is it’s the moral analogue of falsificationism.
I am not sure that that distinction works. If we look at the history of natural philosophy, we see that people had all kinds of ideas about reality that were not solidly based on experience.
The idea that experience is the final arbiter for what is real is not itself real. It's an idea that cannot be tested against reality. So ultimately, all such testing requires prior reasoning to establish what does and does not count as evidence.
:up: :clap: :100:
The 'strength of their reasons' just means the extent to which you agree with them. So all you're saying here is "I don't care about what other people think, all that matters is what I think", which is relativism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, you're missing the point. If we agreed on what counts as moral then we could carry out this exercise on any competing claims. The point I'm making here is that we don't agree on what is moral beyond a vague family resemblance sufficient to use the word in day-to-day talk.
You want to say that moral decisions need not be realitivistic. You do so by presenting a moral system which has clear measures of right and wrong. But your choice of measures is relativistic. It's based entirely on reasons seeming to you to be sound, valid and accounted for.
If your meta-ethical position is relativistic, then all moral decisions arising from it are going to be relativistic too.
Indeed. I'm not sure how you think that impacts on what I said. Normative propositions are always dependent on agreement (otherwise they're commands "you will", not "you should"). There is widespread agreement that experience arbitrates reality, at least so far as negation is concerned (that which is contrary to all experience is not the case). So universal statements from empiricism work - "letting go of that ball will cause it to drop".
Some people disagree with experience as an arbitrator. The extremely religious might, in some circumstances, believe God will hold the ball up and their past experiences are irrelevant compared to their faith. Statements based on empiricism will be useless to these people. But they are extremely rare, so it matters very little.
With hedonism being the arbiter of morality, there's no such widespread agreement, not even close. So universal statements based on such a meta-ethic are useless, they only have any normative force for the group who already agree with the meta-ethical position.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, but we're not new to this. The human race has been at this for millenia. We've already very strongly landed on some form of empiricism to arbitrate everyday reality, we don't have any cause to doubt that.
@Pfhorrest is trying to argue that we can take hedonic experiences to be evidence of moral value in the same way as we take phenomenal experiences to be evidence of physical reality. I'm saying that this is not the case. The widespread agreement about the principle of taking phenomenal experiences to be evidence of physical reality actually matters, it's the reason we can just take it as read. There being no such existing agreement about the relationship between hedonic experience and moral value is what means we cannot make the same presumption.
There is also widespread agreement that killing babies for fun is wrong. I'd wager even less people disagree with that than disagree with experience as an arbitrator. So if we're going to base our conclusions on how widespread agreement is, there are at least some moral rules that are extremely widespread. On a meta-ethical level, variations on the "golden rule" are also very widespread.
But I don't think it's very convincing in the first place to argue that "as long as less than X% of people disagree with an idea, it can be considered true".
Quoting Isaac
But of course, the goal of a moral philosophy is to convince, much like the goal of a scientific paper on some subject. Your argument would lead to the conclusion that the only valid moral philosophy is the one everyone already agrees with, in which case there'd be no moral philosophy in the first place.
Quoting Isaac
True, but it did take us thousands of years - until the 18th century - to really figure out how to ask the right questions. And it did not take long for the scientific method to become so obvious that most people can't even imagine there was a time when people didn't know how to "arbitrate reality" based on experience.
What tells you that the same process will not happen to moral philosophy in 100 years?
Quoting Isaac
But does this mean that before the argeement existed - i.e. before the 18th century, the scientific method was not the correct way to gain information about phenomenal reality?
Quoting Isaac
Consider the negation of that. “I care about what other people think, that matters, not just what I think.” That’s basically majoritarianism. Whatever a majority thinks is correct? How is that not relativism? By your logic, absolutely everything would be relativism.
But in any case, my position is not “only what I think matters”. I don’t expect anyone to take anything just at my word. I only expect them to honestly consider the reasons I share with them, like I do others’. Then in light of all those shared reasons we’ve all got to make up our own minds. Because the alternative would just be to think what someone says to think just because they say so.
Indeed, but this has any bearing on what I'm saying. I was talking about the lack of widespread agreement over the method of reaching moral judgements, not the conclusions.
Quoting Echarmion
I disagree, but even if that were so, it doesn't even approach basic empiricism.
Quoting Echarmion
Neither do I, I never even mentioned 'truth'.
Quoting Echarmion
What scientific papers are you reading? The goal of scientific papers is to present the degree to whicha model fits the experimental data. It should have zero to do with convincing (even if it sometimes does). Morality, on the other hand, is all about convincing, it's built in.
Quoting Echarmion
I'm not talking about the scientific method (the detail of it) I'm talking about devising theories of reality based on the degree to which they conflict with experience. 6 month old babies do it. I didn't take us thousands of years, it's built into our DNA.
No it's not, it's humility. It's recognising that others might see things you don't, or in a way you don't understand.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right, which is where we started. Your approach to judging what is the 'right' meta-ethical position is simply to consider all the reasons for adopting that position which seem to you to be sound.
So back to my original question. If this is a satisfactory approach to determining the right approach to moral judgement, why isn't it equally satisfactory for determining correct behaviour? Simply consider all the reasons for behaving that way which seem to you to be sound. Why suggest some alternative system?
Most people reach moral conclusions intuitively, the same way that most people use something related to the empiricism intuitively. Otherwise, it'd be hard to explain how humans can live together in societies.
Quoting Isaac
But if we're talking about degrees, we're not establishing some fundamental difference between the two kinds of making judgements.
Quoting Isaac
But you nevertheless seem to base your distinction on how many people agree with basic empiricsim versus how many people agree with the golden rule.
Quoting Isaac
No, I think you're applying two different standards here. In theory, a scientific paper needs only present the evidence. In practice, science is a social activity and requires convincing. In the same way it can be argued that, in theory, the correct moral philosophy only needs to present it's arguments. In practice, it too needs to do so convincingly.
Quoting Isaac
It seems to me, though, that this fails to explain why the enlightenment accelerated the speed of scientific advancement as much as it did.
No, that’s what listening to others’ reasons is, which I advocated and do. You’re talking about whose word is gospel: my own or someone else’s. My actual answer is “nobody’s”, but you caricatured that as “just mine”, so I pointed out that the opposite of that is “everybody else’s”, which is equally absurd.
In a conversation long ago, someone asked me rhetorically “who gets to decide what is objective?” and my answer was “nobody — that’s what makes it objective.”
Quoting Isaac
To the extent that that is a correct description of my “meta-meta-ethicical” position, it IS also a description of my meta-ethical position itself. The analogue of the reasons are the experiences, and every moral agent has to fairly and honestly consider every experience everyone has (like we have to fairly and honestly consider every else’s reasons), and figure out to the best of their ability what possibilities are compatible with the sum of all of those experiences (like we each have to figure out to the best of our ability what possibilities are compatible with the sum of all the reasons we’ve encountered).
The alternatives are either to take someone’s word for it (possibly just one’s own), or else give up and say there are no answers (so anything goes). My whole philosophy is just what’s left after avoiding either of those options: don’t just take anyone’s word for it, but don’t just give up either. Assume there are some correct answers, and every proposal as to what they are is open to question. So consider the possibility of anything that might be an answer (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to give up), except those that can’t be tested against our experiences (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to take someone’s word for it).
I think pure ethics is not based on what you feel, experience, believe or agree with, but what you want and need, with needs prioritized over wants. If we give someone what they want or need, and it doesn't obstruct either satisfying a greater need or someone's more important wants, it is ethical. If we give someone what they don't want, but its what they need, that can be ethical so long as the consequences turn out how we expect them to. If we don't give individuals what they want or need, and it doesn't refuse anyone their wants or needs, that is not unethical. And of course if we intentionally and avoidably deny someone their wants and needs in a way that individuals concerned deem of destructive consequence, that is unethical.
Obviously a huge gray area exists because of the complexity of cause and effect, but the basic principle to deal with ever present dilemma is reciprocation. If unethical acts are performed on someone from whatever cause, compensation has to be given or one's own wants or needs are revoked, and we have all kinds of ethical norms to regulate this which are organically emerging in each moment as well as traditionalized by larger scale cultural customs and institutional laws.
That's working ethical rationale, but in consort with total psychology it becomes much more...
The issue is in determining nondestructive logistical steps by which to progress the species from an existence of psychological irrationalities towards more peace with ethical rationale.
I agree. I'm arguing here against the opposite view, that moral decisions are (or can be) some kind of rational attempt to find what is 'right' by some pseudo-scientific method.
Quoting Echarmion
I didn't say we were. Just s significant one. Virtually every single person in the world from 2 year-olds to senile geriatrics, from psychopaths to saints, all believe in the external reality of the table in front of them, they all believe that it will behave in the same way for you as it does for them, and they all have done since we crawled out of the caves. The only exceptions are the insane and the mystical (possibly the same category).
Any form of communication, or social endeavour relies on these shared concepts. I can communicate with, or share an activity with, almost anyone on the planet at any point in time, based on the fact that there's a stable external world whose properties are not fixed by my mind.
I cannot make even the slightest progress on any communication or joint activity based on the notion that what is morally 'good' is that which feels hedonically 'good', because there is no such shared belief in this association.
Nor can I make any progress meta-ethically assuming that my assessment of 'the reasons' for believing the above position to be best, will be shared by many others - each person's assessment of any given collection of 'reasons' seems to also be different.
So I don't see how this meta-ethical position is anything other than a statement of @Pfhorrest's state of mind. Interesting to a psychologist, but nothing more.
The statement "Sex before marriage is not morally 'bad' because it doesn't feel bad to anyone who imagines what it would feel like" is mostly useless other than as a statement of the speaker's state of mind. It's only compelling to a group of people who already believe in that meta-ethical approach.
The statement "An hedonic-based ethical systems is best because my assessment of the reasons for and against it is such that I find it the most compelling" is also mostly useless other than as a statement of the speaker's state of mind. It is only useful to the small group of people who (for whatever reason) trust that person's judgement for the modification of their own beliefs.
The statement "This bridge can only carry 8 Tons", however, is potentially useful to the entire world. Absolutely everyone would agree that if the limits of the materials tend, in tests, to break after being subjected to more than 8 Tons, that they will not magically act differently for different people, that no amount of belief on my part can make the bridge carry more, that at no point will the bridge suddenly act as if it's made of cheese...
The difference in the utility of different classes of statement may well only be one of degree, but the degree is hugely significant.
Merely listening isn't sufficient, that still makes the egotistical assumption that you understand, and have the capacity to better judge the quality of those reasons, that your assessment of them is the better one to go on. When I explain to my students some aspect of a theory they don't get, they don't (most of them) go away presuming their professor has gone mad and is expounding a theory which makes no sense, they don't assume that my collection of reasons for reaching that conclusion must be faulty or incomplete because they don't tally with their understanding. They presume they just haven't understood, they ask for clarity. Some never get clarity, they just repeat the reasons I've given to them by rote, pass their finals and never look back. They still don't (generally) assume I'm wrong and the whole subject makes no sense, they walk away thinking "well, I didn't understand a word of that".
I'm not suggesting you should take any alternative approach than go with what seems to you to be right. There's no other option. I'm saying that your personal assessment of the reason has no bearing on the objective 'rightness' of some meta-ethic when there is widespread disagreement among your epistemic peers. If they disagree, and they have no less intellectual capacity and no less data than you, then it is only reasonable to assume that your position is tentative at the very least. The more widespread the disagreement, the more fragile any position within that scope becomes.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think this is quite a reasonable approach, but it's not the aspect I'm disputing. What I'm disputing is that moral statements are the sorts of things which can be tested against our experiences. You've merely declared that they are, and cited, in support of that declaration, the fact that you've 'taken into account' everyone else's reasons for thinking otherwise.
Damn, that's harsh, bullied into herd submission before we even got started lol
I think intersection of ethics and language is a really effective way to frame the issue epistemologically, but its going to be challenging, because what it really amounts to is non b.s. psychology, and that doesn't even exist yet.
...and you thought I was harsh!
Thank you for reminding me that this thread is not supposed to be about me and Isaac yet again arguing about my entire meta-ethical system, but rather about a survey of specifically moral semantic positions and their faults and then (I hoped) a discussion of philosophy of language more generally to explore what moral semantics could be possible to avoid those faults.
The faults of the other views surveyed boil down to failing in some way or another these criteria:
-Holding moral statements to be capable of being true or false, in a way more than just someone agreeing with them, as people usually treat them
-Honoring the is-ought / fact-value divide.
-Independence of any controversial ontology (i.e. compatible with physicalism).
What you end up needing is some kind of non-descriptivist cognitivism.
I’m going to ignore Isaac’s constant harping on that first criterion above and just move on to actual philosophy of language stuff.
The first important thing I think we need to do to make sense of a non-descriptivist cognitivism is to distinguish between what I call "expression" and "impression". I think the best way to illustrate this distinction is to consider a philosophical problem called "Moore's Paradox", put forth by G.E. Moore. The paradox is that while it is clearly possible for someone to disbelieve something that is nevertheless true — all sorts of people hold incorrect beliefs all the time — there seems to be something contradictory in that person themselves stating that fact: "X is true but I don't believe X".
My resolution to this apparent paradox is to distinguish between the speech-acts of "expressing", which is a demonstration of one's own mental state, one's thoughts or feelings, and "impressing", which is attempting to affect a mental state in another person; and to highlight how, if we assume a speaker is being honest and not manipulative, we assume an impression from them upon our minds to imply also an expression of their own mind. That is to say, when they impress upon us that X is true, if we assume that they are honest, we take that to also express their own belief that X is true. If they then impress upon us that they don't believe X is true, that impression contradicts the preceding implied expression of their belief.
It is akin to shouting in a rage "I'M NOT ANGRY!". There is nothing self-contradictory in the content impressed, in either case — it's possible for someone to be non-angry, and it's possible for someone to disbelieve a truth — but just as the raged shouting expresses anger in contradiction to the impressed claim of non-anger, the utterance "X is true" implicitly expresses belief in X, and so contradicts the attendant impression of disbelief.
The more common term "assertion" can, I think, be taken to be equivalent to my term "impression" here, but I like how the linguistic symmetry of "im-" and "ex-" illustrates the distinction: to "express" is literally to "push out", and one may imagine an illustration of expression as little arrows pointing out of the speaker's mind; while to "impress" is literally to "push in", and one may imagine an illustration of impression as an arrow pointing into the listener. Though I've spoken of impressions and expressions thus far only as they apply to statements, pushing thoughts from speaker to listener, the distinction can also be applied equally to questions, where an impressed question is a direct question figuratively pulling something straight from a listener, while an expressed question is a more open-ended wondering, a demonstration of the speaker's own uncertainty and openness to input should anyone have any to offer.
Sentences of the forms "I wonder if X." and "Is it true that X?" clearly illustrate the difference. Since questions "pull" rather than "push", we might continue the clear Latinate verbal illustration by terming the "is it true" type of question an "extraction", meaning literally "pulling-out" of the listener, and the "I wonder" type of question an "intraction" — not "inter-action", but "in-traction" — meaning literally "pulling-in" to the speaker. The difference intended here is like the difference between billing someone for a service, versus putting out a hat so passers-by can donate what they like. The difference between impression and expression is likewise comparable to the difference between sending a product to someone directly, versus setting it out with a "free" or "take one" sign.
The difference between impression and expression is somewhat analogous to, but not literally the same as, the difference between the imperative and indicative linguistic moods, inasmuch as an impressive speech-act is effectively telling someone what to think (or in an impressive question, telling them to tell you something), while an expressive speech-act is effectively showing others what you think (or in an expressive question, showing your uncertainty).
However it is important to stress that I am not saying impressions are literally imperative and expressions are literally indicative, because I hold that the ordinary indicative type of statement that's generally held to be the plainest, most default kind of statement is itself a kind of impressive speech-act: saying "Bob throws the ball" impresses a belief in Bob throwing the ball, implicitly tells the listener to believe that Bob throws the ball, and so is kind of imperative-like in that way, but is still distinct from the literal imperative "Bob, throw the ball!".
Similarly, expressive speech-acts, while they are indicative-like in the manner that they communicate, can be more imperative-like in their contents, such as "I think Bob ought to throw the ball", without impressing that opinion on anyone, much less Bob himself. But, of course, we can also merely express indicative-like, descriptive opinions, ala "I think Bob throws the ball", and most importantly, I hold that we can also impress imperative-like, prescriptive opinions, ala "Bob ought to throw the ball". Expression and impression are about how an opinion is delivered; it's a separate matter as to what the contents of that opinion are.
More to come after we’ve discussed this part.
I think you may be overvaluing the argument from queerness. Do you have decisive reason to believe that only physical, natural facts exist? Take the true statement that there is an infinite amount of prime numbers. What is it true about? Is there something physical, or tangible, that you can present to me as an instantiation of the infinity of prime numbers? Mathematical truths are certainly not prescriptive, they are descriptive, but what do they describe?
The simplest answer would be "abstract objects." Do abstract objects exist? Well, if "P exists" just MEANS "P is physical," the answer is no. But, this may be an unnecessarily limiting conception of existence. Perhaps what it is for something to exist is, instead, for there to be a state of affairs that can ground factual claims about that thing. The infinity of the real numbers between 0 and 1 is greater than the infinity of the natural numbers. This statement is true. Is it spooky because it corresponds to a state of affairs that is not physical? I think not.
What differentiates the narrow sense and the broad sense as you speak of them, other than the fact that the narrow sense is physical and the broad sense is not? Mathematical statements make claims that are sometimes true. What does it mean for something to be true if not for the proposition to correspond to reality? Of course, I agree with you that neither mathematical nor moral facts correspond to something physical. But if all you mean by "the narrow sense of existence" IS the physical sense, then the moral non-naturalist does not disagree with you at all. The moral non-naturalist also agrees that moral facts are not physical.
If mathematical claims are not descriptive(describing a feature of reality), nor normative(counting in favor of an agent's doing or believing X), what kind of claims are they? To hold that moral claims are made true in virtue of "moral stuff," if we mean "stuff" in the usual sense, is naturalism. Non-naturalism would deny this, as do you, so I don't see where exactly you disagree with it.
Mathematical principles do appear to be a part of reality. At the very least, some mathematical principles appear to accurately describe physical reality, while others do not. One principle may provide a model for how planets orbit stars, while another may describe nothing that we see. But, the truth of both follows from the same axioms. They are both true for the same reasons. "Physical" versus "abstract" is a useful distinction, but is it the very same distinction as "real" and "not real?"
Does something seem so objectionable about referring to "mathematical reality," of which our present physical reality is only one of many possible subsets? We could imagine a world with different fundamental forces, or distinct physical composition, before we could imagine one with square circles and finite primes. The concept of a three-sided triangle corresponds to reality in a way that a four-sided triangle does not. When I say "a four-sided triangle does not exist," I am saying something MORE than that a four-sided triangle is merely not physical. After all, a three-sided triangle is also not physical, yet there is a difference between them.
Apologies for the wall of text, but I'm very interested in this topic.
I'll give you an additional front of queerness to grapple with.
All of the following can mean "Bob ought to throw the ball":
"Bob is a big dick" (heckling fan)
"Bob knows" (coach)
"Bob, you damn idiot!" (teammate)
"We love Bob" (opposing team)
"wAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" (little sister)
"Who the hell cares" (nonfan)
"Bob shouldn't throw the ball!" (joking observer)
And this is about as unambiguous as real world meaning gets. How do you systematically account for all that context-variance and nuance of linguistic intention? (Me, I don't think its currently possible, which is why I glossed over theorizing modern language use while writing my own pet book project, but I'd be curious to see if you can generalize it)
Not Pfhorrest, but I'll give my 2 cents. This isn't a problem unique to moral reasoning. Different people could use the utterances,
"The woman who gave birth to me"
"The nurse employed by me"
"The one who is scared of spiders"
"The person who stood in that Starbucks at 5:00 PM"
"Ma-ma!"
"La madre de este nino"
"Hey, YOU!"
All to refer to the same woman, my mother. We can attempt to remove ambiguity by providing further clarification. We can never fully resolve this problem, as a person can really attach any internal meaning to whatever words they like. But, most of the time, we seem to understand what other people mean and they seem to understand us. It's not the type of thing that can be or needs to be systematized: there is no hard and fast rule to figure out the meaning of words, one must just attempt to resolve it with their interlocutor.
The broad sense is just the sense of “a statement that is correct” in any sense. The narrow sense is the sense of “a statement describing the world, that is correct”. Mathematical statements have implications about what can be real (which descriptions of the world can be correct), but they also have implications about what can be moral (which prescriptions of the world can be correct). They are more abstract than either description or prescription, and no more directly say what is real than they directly say what is moral.
Quoting Tarrasque
They are statements of relations between ideas, formal logical inferences, without necessarily impressing a descriptive or prescriptive attitude toward those ideas.
A classic example of a formal logical inference is that from the propositions "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" we can logically infer the proposition "Socrates is mortal". But, I hold, we could equally well infer from the propositions "all men ought to be mortal" and "Socrates ought to be a man" that "Socrates ought to be mortal". I say that it is really just the ideas of "all men being mortal" and "Socrates being a man" that entail the idea of "Socrates being mortal", and whether we hold descriptive, mind-to-fit-world attitudes about those ideas, or prescriptive, world-to-fit-mind attitudes about them, whether we're impressing or expressing those attitudes, even whether we're making statements or asking questions about them, does not affect the logical relations between the ideas at all.
Quoting Tarrasque
I do actually support something like this, in the form of mathematicism (or the mathematical universe hypothesis), but for me that’s really an extension of modal realism: any world that can possibly be, is, both in terms of configurations of a universe with the mathematical structure that ours has, and in terms of other mathematical structures. But claims of possibility is not made true by their accurately describing these other possible worlds, but rather by the internal consistency of the structures they posit, and the other possible worlds are limited by that same requirement of self-consistency, so they necessarily coincide.
Quoting Enrique
Quoting Tarrasque
You got it in one. Thanks.
I see. I think that what is different between our ontologies must hinge on this notion of what it means for a proposition to be correct. What is your account of truth? I endorse a correspondence theory: P is true just in case P actually obtains. What does it mean for P to obtain? Well, that the real state of affairs is such that P. What else might it mean for a statement to be correct?
I'm interested in how you suggest that mathematics has moral implications. Could you elaborate on this idea?
Sure, those arguments are both of deductively valid form. I find that to be a strange usage of the word "ought," however. Ought claims are made about agents, prescribing that they should take a certain action or accept a particular belief. I wouldn't consider, for example, "all men ought to be made of atoms" to be an ought claim that makes sense. Ought implies can, and whether or not I am made of atoms, or am mortal, is far outside the jurisdiction of one's agency. You cannot provide a reason, normatively speaking, that I should be made of atoms. It's unclear what this could even consist in. You could provide a causal explanation, but of course, this is distinct.
I am completely unfamiliar with modal realism, so this does not make a lot of sense to me. I think the best approach here is simply for me to try and paraphrase what you've said and wrap my head around it. I take what you're proposing to be something like this:
We often speak in terms of possible worlds, in many different senses. We can talk about physically possible worlds(consistent with the laws of physics), morally possible worlds(consistent with our world's moral truths), mathematically or logically possible worlds, and impossible worlds in every such sense. All logically and mathematically possible worlds(considering the relationship between logic and math, they may be one and the same set) actually exist. The only feature that can disqualify a world from existence is its instantiation of self-contradictory properties - these worlds are contained within the set of the logically and mathematically impossible worlds(a world where the law of non-contradiction is true, for example). As long as a world fulfills this single criterion, it is modally real. That is to say, we can conceive of it, discuss it meaningfully, and make true claims about it. Correct me if I'm mistaken in my understanding of your beliefs.
A pragmatist one, especially hinging on the concepts of speech-acts (different types of which I plan on discussing over the course of this thread), where what makes a statement true depends entirely on what you're trying to do by making that statement. Describing and prescribing are different kinds of speech-actions, and so each have different criteria for doing them correctly, successfully, which when fulfilled make the statements true.
Quoting Tarrasque
It cannot be correct to prescribe something that is logically contradictory, any more than it is correct to prescribe something that is logically contradictory. ("Ought" implies "can", as you say). Mathematics is about exploring the possibilities of different abstract structures, and the limits of that possibility limit what could be moral as much as they limit what could be real.
Quoting Tarrasque
Not necessarily. We can very well say that everybody ought to have access to adequate food and water and shelter and medicine etc, and nobody ever ought to have to die; those would be good states of affairs. Them being good states of affairs has some implications on what actions agents ought to do, but it's not directly a statement about what anyone ought to do. We can likewise make prescriptive evaluations of the past: this or that atrocity or tragedy ought not have happened, which can mean that some people in the past ought not have done certain things, but even in that case, there's nothing anybody can do about it now, so we're not telling anybody at present what to do, we're just calling something that happened in the past bad.
If someone said that you ought to be made of atoms, that would mean to me that there was something better about being made of atoms than some alternative. Even if you have no control over it, that it ought to be the case just means that it's better for it to be the case than not.
Quoting Tarrasque
Your take is more or less correct, but if you're more interested in the details, I just wrote a lengthy post about it in another thread, and you can also read about modal realism more generally on Wikipedia or SEP, and more about the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis specifically on Wikipedia (I'm surprised Stanford doesn't have an article on it, or even on Tegmark generally, at all).
Interesting take. I look forward to reading your expansion on it. It seems to capture some of our evaluative language well, while to describe other forms, it appears to be more of a stretch. You raised the excellent example yourself of historical moral evaluation. Since ought does imply can, I find it unlikely that by saying something like "The Holocaust was wrong," we are literally prescribing a course of action for the dead perpetrators. Rather, I believe that we are presenting an evaluation on the moral fact of the matter.
I agree with this. Well put(assuming one of those instances of "prescribe" was meant to read "describe.")
I agree with what you are saying here, somewhat. Some states of affairs are better than others. It is sometimes the case that agents ought to act in ways that actualize these states of affairs. I could rephrase your statement as "everybody having access to adequate food and water is good." The fact that this is good provides agents with a defeasible reason to bring it about, in other words, ceteris paribus, they ought to act towards this end. You could describe a good state of affairs as either "a state that is good" or "a state that ought to be the case," but of the two, I think that the former does a better job at preserving what we mean when we use moral language. I think there are some circumstances where a state of affairs is good, but yet, it ought not to be the case - no individual or group ought to(or, more strongly, is obligated to) act in such a way as to bring it about. Note here that I believe oughts can apply to groups of agents just as well as single agents, take for instance, "The senate ought to pass law L."
I can't say I understand your opposition to non-naturalism. The argument from queerness(What would a moral fact even look like?) equally defeats all abstract facts. Yet, given your views on modal realism, logic, and mathematics, you have no issue dealing in objective facts that cannot be seen or touched. You seem not to consider them spooky. Do you consider the argument from queerness to be uniquely efficacious against moral facts for some reason? If all we can say about moral facts is that they have equally substantial grounding to other abstract facts(math, logic), that seems good enough to justify all the types of moral reasoning we like to use.
I take those, prescriptions and evaluations, to be more or less the same thing: the impression of opinions with world-to-mind direction of fit. I guess this is as good a place as any to move on to that, which was to be the next part I wanted to discuss after impression and expression, but since nobody's commented on that yet and we're already talking about this, I may as well go on about that now.
The short form of how I disagree with expressivism, to the motivations for which I am otherwise quite sympathetic, is that I hold moral utterances to not be expressing desires any more than descriptive utterances express perceptions. Rather, just as descriptive utterances impress beliefs, I would say that moral, prescriptive utterances impress intentions.
I've already elaborated on the difference between expression and impression above, but to elaborate on this difference between desires and intentions, and the analogous difference between perceptions and beliefs: In the field of moral psychology, there has been debate over the nature of "moral beliefs", which we can say are more or less the mental states communicated, in one way or another, by moral utterances. The two main sides of that debate are the Humeans and the Kantians. The Humeans hold that beliefs, properly speaking, that is to say cognitive states of mind that can possibly be true or false, are either about definitional relations of ideas to each other (as in logic and mathematics), or else about expectations of sensations or perceptions, and that everything else is mere sentiment or emotion. They agree with the argument from queerness that a "moral belief" would be a very strange thing, asking exactly what difference we would be to expect in our perception of reality if we held some "moral belief" instead of another. Finding no answer to that question apparent, they conclude that there actually are no such things as moral beliefs, only sentiments, emotions, feelings, specifically desires for things to be one way and not another. Kantians, on the other hand, bite the bullet of the argument from queerness, and affirm that there are such things as moral beliefs, that are capable of being true or false.
I find this Humeanism vs Kantianism to be a false dichotomy, and moral expressivism vs moral realism to be a false dichotomy as well. I think, like the Humean, that there are no such things as "moral beliefs" per se, and that moral utterances do not have any meaning to be found in some description of reality; but I also think, like the Kantian, that moral utterances do much more than just express desires incapable of being correct or incorrect. My position is not even that moral utterances impress desires, because I hold that desires are not the only mental state besides beliefs, and that beliefs are not the only cognitive mental states either, capable of being correct or incorrect. I use the term "opinion" to name the overarching category of mental states I am going to subdivide here, and I analyze an opinion as something I term an "attitude" toward something I term an "idea". The idea component of an opinion can be thought of as a mental picture of some possible, imaginable state of affairs, though it doesn't have to be literally visual: it is just the state of affairs that the opinion is about. But one can have different positions on different kinds of opinions about the same thing, and those different kinds of opinions about the same thing are what I mean by attitudes.
One important difference in attitude toward an idea is sometimes called "direction of fit", in reference to the terms "mind-to-world fit" and "world-to-mind fit". In a "mind-to-world fit", the mind (i.e. the idea) is meant to fit the world, in that if the two don't fit (if the idea in the mind differs from the world), then the mind is meant to be changed to fit the world better, because the idea is being employed as a representation of the world. In a "world-to-mind" fit, on the other hand, the world is meant to fit the mind (i.e. the idea), in that if the two don't fit (if the world differs from the idea in the mind), the world is meant to be changed to fit the mind better, because the idea is being employed as a guide for the world. It is the difference between a picture drawn as a representation of something that already exists, and a picture drawn as a blueprint of something that is to be brought into existence: it may be the same picture, but its intended purpose changes the criteria by which we judge it, and whether we judge the picture, or the thing it is a picture of, to be in error, should they not match. The clearest example of this difference in attitude that I can think of is that, given the idea of a world where some people kill other people, I expect most will agree that that idea is "right" in the sense that they agree with it as a description (most people, I expect, will agree that the world really is like that, and an idea of the world that doesn't feature such a thing is descriptively wrong), but simultaneously that it is "wrong" in the sense that they will disagree with it as a prescription (most people, I expect, will agree that the world morally oughtn't be like that — whatever "morally oughtn't" means to them, which we're getting to — and that a world that features such a thing is prescriptively wrong). Same idea, two different attitudes toward it: the world is that way, yes; but no, it oughtn't be that way. Two different opinions, but about the exact same thing, different not in the idea that they are about, but in the attitude toward that idea.
I take all kind of moral language, "good", "ought", "should", etc, to be conveying this kind of world-to-mind fit.
Quoting Tarrasque
Yes, good catch, and thanks. :-)
Quoting Tarrasque
Yes I agree, when phrased in terms of obligation. Just as truth and falsehood don't capture the full range of alethic modal distinctions -- necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility -- so too just goodness and badness don't capture the full range of deontic modal distinctions -- obligation, supererogatoriety, permissibility, and impermissibility.
Saying that someone "ought" to do something, or that something "should" be or that it would be "good", doesn't necessarily mean it is obligatory. It could very well be a supererogatory good.
Quoting Tarrasque
I think it's important to clarify that I'm not opposed to moral semantics that are not moral naturalism, but rather to a specific stance on moral semantics called moral non-naturalism, which shares all of the same assumptions as naturalism -- cognitivism, descriptivism, robust realism -- and just disagrees on what kind of ontological things make moral claims cognitively true descriptions of reality. I object to moral naturalism for the same reasons the non-naturalist does, but I also object to most of the things they have in common, namely the presupposition that moral claims are trying to describe something about reality.
That would be the impression of an opinion with a mind-to-world direction of fit, and I think moral claims are impressing opinions with a world-to-mind direction of fit instead. This view is not robustly realist, but it's also not subjectivist, because it's not descriptivist at all. But it is still cognitivist, because I don't think that desires, non-cognitive opinions with world-to-mind fit, are the only kinds of opinions with world-to-mind fit, because there are differences in attitude besides just direction of fit, one of which, the one that makes the difference between cognitivism and non-cognitivism, I plan to discuss next, in a later post.
Correct ones of these non-descriptive but still cognitive opinions are not "facts" in the narrow sense, the sense that excludes mathematical claims. They could be called "facts" in a broader sense, but I find that that sense introduces unnecessary confusion, as "fact" seems to have inherently descriptivist connotations. The moral analogue of a "fact" is a "norm"; but NB that "norm" does not imply subjectivism, because "normal", "normative", etc, in their oldest senses, meant "correct" first and foremost, and it's only subjectivist assumptions that whatever everybody else is doing is correct that lead "normal" etc to take on the connotation of "what everyone else is doing". I don't mean it in that sense at all: a norm is just something that ought to be the case, exactly like a fact is something that is the case.
Brilliant work of philosophical investigation "I'm going to ignore the part where there's some issue with one of my central claims and move on to discuss my conclusions assuming it to be the case"
What exactly is the point of your continued posting here if you're just going to ignore disputes? We're not your students, and this is not (as you've repeatedly been told) a platform for you to publicise your pet theories. If you want a one way conversation, write a fucking book, don't post on a public discussion forum and then complain when you get a public discussion.
Well, my argument is that we managed to go from "intuitive empiricism" but controversial and variously flawed natural philosophies to scientific empiricism and scientific materialism.
Therefore, it doesn't strike me as prima facie absurd that we might go from intuitive moral judgement and controversial and flawed moral philosophy to some more universally accepted system of practical morality.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, that's a good point. We're certainly more reliant on a shared concept of external reality than we are on a shared meta-ethical theory.
But I wouldn't say that we cannot make "the slightest progress" on a joint idea of meta-ethics. I think you can use Hedonism, to take your example, as a fairly reliable heuristic to how people approach everyday questions. After all, that's the principle behind a basic economy. Both parties trade because they each get something they want more than what they trade away.
Of course, actual human relations are a lot more complex, but there is some evidence for shared meta-ethical frameworks.
Quoting Isaac
Well there is a basic notion underlying a lot of philosophy that reason is a basic ability all humans have, and that therefore a correct reasoning will be understood and accepted by everyone.
If you don't share that notion, you'll inevitably end up with relativism in any field. Even the scientific method then isn't correct, it just happened to work until now.
Quoting Isaac
Again, I want to point out that while today, almost everyone would agree that the question "will the bridge hold if I drive across it in this 8 ton truck" is answered via the scientific method, that wasn't always the case. Some other approaches include asking an oracle, offering the gods a sacrifice for safe passage, or ritually blessing the bridge. And people in the past did try those.
So while it seems evident from our modern perspective that the scientific method is simply and obviously correct and that it has so much more utility than any moral philosophy as to be an entirely different kind of idea, a look at history imo shows that it's not so simple. For most of history, natural philosophy and moral philosophy were not much different. That we managed to "solve" the former doesn't make it less likely that the latter can also be solved.
I see. I think though that such progress was not really about metaphysical commitments as much as expanding the line of answerable questions. During the era of, say, religious beliefs about reality, no one built ships according to how a priest suggested, no one sought advice from the clergy as to whether their table might bear their cup. Religious explanations only had any power where empirical answers were difficult. OK, there's always a couple of decades of 'culture wars' as the new areas of investigation impinge on previously religious territory, but by and large it's still a question of adopting empiricism everywhere it is possible, all that changes is the fields it is possible to draw evidence from.
Quoting Echarmion
And 2000 years of complete and utter failure to do so hasn't dampened your enthusiasm any?
Quoting Echarmion
I agree. I didn't say one couldn't use it in some circumstances. The argument is that it does not cover all that we refer to when we talk about morality, and that we could not, even in circumstances where it might apply, appeal to any shared axioms to persuade dissenters of this.
Quoting Echarmion
Again is refer you to the 2000 years of abject failure to agree on anything outside of empirical knowledge. If reason was a basic ability and its recognition universal, then why so much disagreement over the validity of reasons?
The fact that YOU don’t agree with one point isn’t reason to halt the entire discussion that wasn’t even supposed to be about that point just to waste pages and pages on pointlessly trying to convince YOU of something most people don’t need convincing of.
Moral nihilism or relativism (same thing really) are far, far from universally accepted, and the common objection to numerous of the meta-ethical theories surveyed in the OP is that they require moral nihilism or relativism. The point of this thread is to explore the possibilities a meta-ethics that is not vulnerable to the common objections to all those ones surveyed in the OP. That you are unconvinced by one of those objections shouldn’t stop the whole rest of the discussion.
What even is your meta-ethics anyway? Expressivism?
Fine. The polite way of achieving that is to say something like "let's come back to that, I want to discuss other things", not snipe at someone for 'harping on' as if objection to your position was an irritating side-track.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So now the majority does make right? Your meta-philosophy is very mixed.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If what you're discussing here really is new and not something that philosophers before you have already thought of and dismissed, then you need to publish. Do you even realise the monumental unlikelihood of you having come up with some solution that 2000 years of moral philosophers haven't?
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's not. The rest of the discussion can carry on and still address the issues I raise, you're having several discussions at once already. You're not obliged to answer, you're quite welcome to chair your own discussion in whatever way you see fit, but there's no reason to treat those who disagree with you as an irritant. It just makes you come across as dogmatic and proselytising, rather than discursive.
Majority doesn’t make right, but it shows that this isn’t some crazy new idea of mine that needs to be conclusively proven before we can move on. It’s a reasonable background assumption that can be taken as a premise for another conversation, not something that the entire conversation has to be about.
Quoting Isaac
What do you think is appropriate discussion material for a philosophy forum? Are we only allowed to talk about things that other philosophers have already said? No original thoughts allowed?
I don’t know for sure how original my thoughts are. I’m passingly familiar with a few similar ones. I hope to find out more about any similar thoughts and the arguments about them that have already been had, if any, by discussing them in a public place like this. I don’t have the time = money to conduct an exhaustive professional literature review to be absolutely sure of where my thoughts fit in the ongoing professional dialogue, and I don’t have the accredited nor the time = money to get it to even be considered by a professional publication.
What else is someone who has as far as they can tell original thoughts supposed to do in such a situation, besides talk about them with other amateurs?
I'm not seeing the difference. If majority agreement does not act as any kind truth-maker then how is it that ideas which have majority support can be taken as a reasonable background assumption? From what consequence of majority agreement does it derive its reasonableness if not some greater liklihood of being right?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Listen with some moderate humility to what those others have to say where you've no reason other than your personal disagreement to dismiss them.
This reminds of Dennett's dig about "real magic": "real magic" isn't real, doesn't exist; the magic that's real (that you can see on stage) isn't "real magic". He was making this in response to dualists who insist that, whatever scientists discover about the relationship between brain and consciousness, i.e. the consciousness that's real, that isn't "real consciousness".
"is what culture says is good good..?" is another example: it insists upon the existence of an external measure of the good of a cultural good. Most of the difficulties described in the OP arise from that insistence, since they deal with "real morality" rather than morality in the real world.
It’s a discursively thing at issue here, not a strictly logical one. If one were to propose to the pre-Copernican world something that takes for granted that the Earth revolves around the sun, one would first have to get anybody at all on board with that presupposition before one could move on to the actual topic. But that same discussion today doesn’t first have to established heliocentrism: we can take it for granted that most people just assume it and go on from there, and argue for heliocentrism with the doubters elsewhen, but never telling them to just accept it because the majority does.
I suddenly shifted away from debating you when Echarmion’s comment reminded me that I didn’t come here to discuss the merits of heliocentrism, I came to discuss some ideas about space travel that take heliocentrism for granted, and then foolishly got bogged down debating a geocentist instead of getting on with the actual topic.
Quoting Isaac
I have reasons for disagreement, that I’ve repeatedly shared. And I do listen carefully to everyone, looking for anything new I haven’t already considered. There just isn’t a lot of that to be found, so most things I listen to are things I’ve already heard and already have reasons not to agree with. Which I then share.
How would that mesh with your bio-social relativism? The body and your society say that one thing is good, the gods (remember we’re imagining a world where they’re real) say another thing is. Which should we listen to? Why? Which is actually good? What should we actually do? Is that a meaningless question?
Even within your bio-social relativism, what if the body and society give different directives? Which should we listen to and why?
That wasn't the easiest to parse, but I think I can safely say yes: if gods were the actual phenomena underlying our morality, it would be meaningless to ask if what the gods command is itself good. And if that seems an absurd conclusion, check the quality of the proposition :rofl: I believe this is commonly espoused among the devout, and was the basis of Kierkegaard's "Knight for God" notion in which the good of a command from God is always good, even if it seems evil to those around you.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, body and society conflict. The example I gave before was Abu Ghraib, in which soldiers who felt that what they were doing was very wrong did it anyway because that's what the group did, which is a powerful incentive (fear of retribution or outcasting are long-standing socio-biological fears, presumably meant do deter us from antisocial behaviour - boy, did that backfire). This is one of the effects I see in living in large, co-mingled groups: cultures become diverse, leaving the field open for a power-grab, in this case as in many by violent thugs.
In smaller groups, culture is more homogeneous, making it unlikely that you will encounter someone cultural different from yourself, so the problem should not arise... in principle.
I've just realised I am rewriting Genesis! Small social groups being the natural state of moral ignorance allowed by homogeneity, with our fall from grace related to an awareness of good and evil thrust upon us. If I can just work in a snake...
So, from where are you getting this idea that moral realism is the equivalent of heliocentrism. Phil Papers Survey has 56.4% lean toward moral realism. A recent survey in America has only 35% believe in objective moral truth. I don't know what sources you're using to arrive at this idea that non-relativist moral truth is taken for granted by most people so much so that discussing any alternative would be like proving heliocentrism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I didn't say 'carefully' I said 'with humility'.
"John believes that abortion is impermissible, while I believe abortion is permissible." This is a statement which makes sense, and would not be strange to hear. In a sentence such as this, do you hold that the use of the word "believes" is a category error? If moral utterances do not express beliefs, how can the above be true or false? Must it be false? How would you reform this sentence to preserve its meaning?
Furthermore, atomic moral sentences can be used to construct valid arguments. Example,
P1. Stealing is wrong.
P2. If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong.
C. Getting your little brother to steal is wrong.
If moral statements express beliefs about matters of fact, this is no different from a common variety modus ponens. Otherwise, there is something strange going on here. If I understand you correctly, when I utter "stealing is wrong," I am impressing on my audience some imperative not to steal. This normative evaluation is capable of being correct or incorrect, by your account, but the meaning of the sentence is nonetheless to impress a particular intent. With this in mind, let us semantically dissect the above modus ponens.
In P1, the atomic sentence "stealing is wrong" impresses an intent by its very utterance. This is due to the type of speech-act you claim it is. In a sense, the statement "stealing is wrong" cannot be disentangled from this force of impression.
Yet, in P2, I state that "IF stealing is wrong," then this other thing is wrong. In this case, I am not committing to impress anything on my audience. The meaning of "stealing is wrong" as an atomic sentence appears different than its use as the antecedent of a conditional. This is problematic for the validity of moral modus ponens. Your theory will have to account for this in some way to be successful.
Alright, I'm following so far. Whether or not this conception is accurate, I like it a lot.
To this point, I will simply offer an alternative explanation. I don't think that "same idea, two different attitudes toward it" captures what is going on in this case. Rather, I hold that these are two distinct ideas. One is that people do murder, the other is that people ought to murder. Somebody could agree or disagree(correctly or incorrectly) with either, in any combination. In accordance with the is-ought distinction, my agreement with one cannot logically follow merely from my agreement from the other.
I find it interesting that you classify "ought" and "should" as distinctly moral language. I have more to say about this below.
I was thinking of supererogatory action when I typed that out, so I'm glad you caught it. While you are correct that "he is obligated to X" is much normatively weightier than "he ought to X," I still think that using "ought" to refer to supererogatory acts is a butchery of our use of the word. If you were to tell me "everybody on the planet ought to live life in constant ecstasy" or "you ought to sacrifice your life to save mine," I would strongly disagree with you. If you then told me that when you used "ought," you really just meant that these things would be good, I would come to agree with you, still believing that you had originally misused the word "ought." I will provide more reasons why I think this below.
Alright, this is the place where I want to talk about reasons and rationality. In all your theorizing on normativity thus far, I have only seen you touch on moral normativity. This is not the only type. I can make claims like:
"You should stop smoking."(Prudential ought)
"You ought to proportion your belief to the evidence."(Rational ought)
"You ought not to beat your wife."(Moral ought)
"You ought to do the thing that you have the most reason to do."
I would like to touch on that last example a little more. "You ought to do the thing that you have the most reason to do." If you are anything like me, you find that incredibly intuitive. I have come to believe that it is essentially the definition of ought. The thing that a person ought to do is the thing that they have the most reason to do. Moral reasons are a type of reason, but often the thing that we have the most moral reason to do is not the thing that we have the most total reason to do(ergo supererogatory actions).
Since moral oughts are not the only type of oughts we use, I am surprised to not see theorizing on broader normativity in your work. Questions like "Is X rational" or "Is P a good reason to Q" need to be answerable, or at least explainable, by any plausible theory of normativity.
Thanks! I'm looking forward to this conversation too (and enjoying it so far already).
Quoting Tarrasque
Natural language is inherently sloppy, and I don't set out to admonish anyone for casually using "belief" to refer to their moral opinions. But because "belief" has descriptivist connotations, especially in the Kantian vs Humean context, I try to be careful to avoid it myself. I say instead that moral utterances impress (and so implicitly also express; you caught the part about impression vs expression earlier?) intentions. And I say that intentions can be objectively correct or incorrect ("true" and "false" also frequently have descriptivist connotations, so I try to avoid them myself, but recognize their casual use). Both intentions and beliefs are subsets of what I call "thoughts" (as distinct from "feelings", "experiences", and other mental states), so the simplest rephrasing of the above would just be to say "John thinks ... while I think ..." instead, since the permissible/impermissible already carry subtler imperative force.
(I want to launch into the next thing I wanted to bring up, thoughts vs feelings or "order of opinion" here, but I don't want to break the flow of this response so I'll put that at the bottom instead).
In general, when not dealing with modalities like that, I would most strictly phrase things as "so-and-so believes such-and-such (to be the case)" for descriptions and "so-and-so intends such-and-such (to be the case)" for prescriptions.
Quoting Tarrasque
This is why I brought up the "Socrates being mortal" example before.
In my system of logic, I propose that rather than treating a statement like "All men are mortal" as one proposition and a statement like "All men ought to be mortal" as another, completely unrelated proposition, we instead take the idea that they have in common, "all men being mortal", and wrap that in a function that conveys what we wish to communicate about some attitude toward that idea. For example we might write there-is(all men being mortal) to mean "all men are mortal", and be-there(all men being mortal) to mean "all men ought to be mortal"; and generally, write there-is(S) and be-there(S) for the equivalent descriptive and prescriptive statements about the idea of some state of affairs S, whatever S is. We might wish to use shorter names for the functions, like simply is() and be(), or some other names entirely; I am merely using the indicative and imperative moods of the copula verb "to be" to capture the descriptive and prescriptive natures of the respective functions.
So in your modus ponens, the logical relationship is actually between "stealing happening" and "getting your little brother to steal": getting your little brother to steal entails stealing happening. So if it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(stealing happening)), and (getting your little brother to steal) entails (stealing happening), then it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(getting your little brother to steal)).
You can replace it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is with it-is-the-case-that-that-there-is and you get the same logical relations, just with descriptive force instead of prescriptive force.
Quoting Tarrasque
Thanks again!
Quoting Tarrasque
I agree completely, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My point is just that the opinion "people do murder" and the opinion "people ought to murder" can both be decomposed into some attitude or another toward the idea of people murdering: one descriptive attitude (the idea does happen) and one prescriptive attitude (the idea should happen). You can totally have different views on each of those full opinions: agree that it does happen, disagree that it should happen. That was the point of using that example, that for most people, I expect their agreement on opinions about the same idea (people murdering) will be opposite for those two kinds of attitude: they'll agree that it does, disagree that it should. Thus illustrating what "people do murder" and "people ought to murder" have in common (the idea of people murdering), and different (the attitudes toward that idea).
Quoting Tarrasque
I see this as just another example of natural language being sloppy. I agree that in some cases "ought" will carry connotations of obligation, rather than merely supererogatory good, and that being blithe to those differences will result in miscommunication. But that's something to sort out rhetorically, and doesn't have much to do with the actual underlying logic I'm on about here.
Quoting Tarrasque
I see prudential oughts as boiling down to a kind of moral ought. Taking care of yourself is a kind of moral good -- not necessarily an obligatory one, but still a moral one even if only supererogatory, you matter just like everybody else matters -- and instrumentally seeing to moral ends is still a kind of moral good. So you should stop smoking because if you don't you'll probably suffer and die, and people suffering and dying is bad.
Rational "oughts" I think can be better rephrased descriptively. "If you proportion your belief to the evidence your belief is more likely to be accurate." You might ask "but should beliefs be accurate?" and the answer to that is a trivial yes, because believing something just is thinking it's an accurate description of reality. If you didn't care to have an accurate description of reality, you wouldn't bother forming beliefs.
I agree completely that "you ought to do the thing that you have the most reason to do" is incredibly intuitive, but I think that a reason to do something just is a moral imperative; largely because of how prudential self-care collapses to moral normativity on my account.
I do have a lot more thoughts on how to justify both beliefs and intentions, which I think is more of the rationality-normativity you're thinking of. But that would get way outside the scope of this thread on semantics. I do intend to start threads on them later, and I hope you'll join in then.
In the meantime, here's the bit about order of opinion (thoughts vs feelings) I cut out from above for flow:
The difference in attitude alone isn't enough to account for what I mean by "intention" as distinct from "desire", which both have the same direction of fit, world-to-mind. To explain that, I need to first elaborate on differences in attitude between opinions with the same mind-to-world fit. More fundamental than opinions are experiences, and an experiences with mind-to-world fit are called "sensations". These are the raw input from our senses, free from any interpretation: the contents of a sensation are colors of light, pitches of sound, and so on, not yet shapes or words. In contrast, the simplest opinions with mind-to-world fit, first-order or irreflexive opinions of that type, are called "perceptions". These are interpretations of that raw sense-data into more abstract representations, but still of the same idea. (An analogy can be made here between raster and vector computer graphics formats, where a raster format stores an array of colored pixels and any shapes that appear in them are merely inferred by human viewers out of the patterns in those pixels; while a vector format stores abstract representations of exact shapes directly, which can then be rendered as arrays of pixels for display. The human viewer senses something like the array of pixels with their eyes, but then in perceiving shapes in the image, they are essentially "vectorizing" the image in their own mind). Further still, higher-order or reflexive opinions with mind-to-world fit are called "beliefs", and I hold that the distinguishing feature of beliefs is that they "objectify" what have thus far been completely subjective opinions, because they are reflexive in attitude, being capable of casting judgement on other opinions with the same content: one can disbelieve one's perceptions, or judge someone else's perception to be wrong as well. A belief is a perception that has been questioned (however thoroughly) and found (however correctly) to be the correct interpretation of sensations, the correct picture to use as a representation of the world, the correct opinion with mind-to-world fit.
I hold that there are analogues to all of those, but with world-to-mind fit instead. I call experiences with world-to-mind fit "appetites". These are composed of the raw inputs of things like pain, hunger, thirst, and so on. While sensations are the experiences that make us feel, on a raw unexamined level, like the world is some way, appetites are those experiences that make us feel, on a raw unexamined level, like the world ought to be some way. I visualize this as building two images, two ideas, in our minds: one of them a picture of the world as it is, meant to serve as a representation of the world, meant to fit the world; and the other of them a picture of the world as it ought to be, meant to serve as a guide for the world, meant for the world to fit. Sensations are those experiences that feed into that first picture, and appetites are those experiences that feed into that second picture. In contrast to those uninterpreted appetites, the simplest opinions with world-to-mind fit, first-order or irreflexive opinions of that type, are called "desires", like the expressivists and Humeans are all about, which I hold to differ from appetites in the same way that perceptions differ from sensations: desires are interpretations of appetites, and while an appetite may have as its content the feeling of, for example, hunger pains, the desire that is interpreted from that will have as its content instead, for example, to eat a burrito; just as sensations may contain patterns of light while perceptions instead contain shapes. And lastly, higher-order or reflexive opinions with world-to-mind fit I call "intentions", and I hold that the distinguishing feature of intentions is that they "objectify" what have thus far been completely subjective opinions, because they are reflexive in attitude, being capable of casting judgement on other opinions with the same content: one can intend other than what one desires, or judge someone else's desires to be wrong as well. An intention is a desire that has been questioned (however thoroughly) and found (however correctly) to be the correct interpretation of appetites, the correct picture to use as a guide for the world, the correct opinion with world-to-mind fit.
It is that reflexivity of attitude that I hold to make an opinion cognitive, apt for being found objectively correct or not, though as they differ in the purposes to which they put their ideas, they differ in the criteria by which they are to be judged correct or incorrect: beliefs are to be judged by appeal to the senses, everyone's senses in all circumstances if they are to be judged objectively, and intentions are to be judged by appeal to the appetites, everyone's appetites in all circumstances if they are to be judged objectively. Intentions are cognitive but non-descriptive opinions; in the same way that perceptions are descriptive but non-cognitive opinions. I like to term cognitive opinions like beliefs and intentions "thoughts", and non-cognitive ones like perceptions and desires "feelings". So when I say that I hold prescriptive statements, moral utterances, to impress intentions rather than to express desires, I mean that they are not simply demonstrating the speaker's present feelings about how things ought to be, any more than descriptive statements are simply demonstrating the speaker's present feelings about how things are. They are instead pushing a considered thought about how everyone should think things ought to be, in the same way that descriptive statements are pushing a considered thought about how everyone should think things are.
I'm very curious about that general American survey because I would think that every religious person would believe in objective moral truth, and the vast majority of Americans are religious. (They'll disagree vehemently with me about how we figure out what the objective moral truth is, but that's a different point).
In any case, the point is not that we can expect everybody to agree with moral realism, the point is that it's not some completely out-there idea that everyone is going to balk at. String theory isn't a universally accepted paradigm of physics, but if someone comes up with a new string-theoretic idea, they don't need to first argue with everyone about whether string theory is even the right approach to begin with, and they would be foolish to let string theory detractors repeating the same points they're undoubtedly quite familiar with already distract them from discussing their new string-theoretic idea. Yes, we get it, you like Loop Quantum Gravity better, but this isn't a LQG vs ST debate, this is just a new ST development.
Quoting Isaac
What is humility in this context but considering the possibility that the other person might be right in their critique? The part immediately after what you quoted was "...looking for anything new I haven’t already considered". Being open to the possibility of that is humility in this context. Having responses ready at hand for the old counterarguments I've considered and discussed a hundred times already isn't a lack of humility, it's just experience. The only thing that wouldn't be humble would be assuming every counterargument is one of those -- which I don't, hence the "carefully", looking for anything that's not.
This seems to be getting at the core of the contention here. What would it mean for gods to be the phenomena underlying our morality? Would it be enough for there to simply exist gods, who issued commands? Or would those commands have to have some kind of magical imperative force that psychically inclines people to obey them?
I think this line of inquiry will really help tease out what you think a claim that something is moral even means (which is the topic of this thread). Does it just mean people are inclined to act that way, so anything people tend to do definitionally is moral? Does it just mean people are inclined to approve of other people acting that way, so anything people tend to approve of definitionally is moral? Or what?
The problem - as ever - is to accept a Cartesian framing of Nature in this fashion. Your opposition of res cogitans and res extensa.
My systems science approach instead aims to show how Nature is a unity created out its divisions. So if "mind" and "matter" appear to be the major division at play here, then this is telling us that Nature is the stable product, the balancing act, that arises out of these two complimentary limits on possibility.
So you don't actually have a "physicalist" account of Nature unless it includes its cognitive aspect as fully as its physical aspect.
This is the same ying-yang, or dependent co-arising, insight as you get in Eastern philosophy. Reality arises from symmetry breaking or dichotomisation.
What we call the physical becomes that aspect of Nature which has the least (but not none) of what we might want to call the mindful, the cognitive, the subjective, about it. And in matching fashion, what we call the mental is the aspect of Nature which has the least (but not none) of what we might want to call the objective, the inanimate, the brute materiality, about it.
In morality, this then provides a holistic perspective where humans are part of the system of Nature. We have to discern the function of Nature - why it exists and where it is headed. And that becomes a baseline for making some judgement about our place within it.
If we turn to science for an "objective physicalist" account of Nature as a system, the answer can still be mighty disappointing to most folk. :cool:
No one much likes the ordinary Cartesian answer where you are either left with Nature being a great big dumb machine, and so offering up no moral imperatives at all. Or you have to talk about the totally abstract imperatives (divine command), or the totally subjective imperatives (complete relativism), that would be the two poles of being that could organise the cognitive realm.
But anyway, our best systems model of Nature is based on the Laws of Thermodynamics. Complexly organised nature exists to serve the function of the dissipation of entropy. So the baseline physics says we rightfully exist to the degree that - as local negentropic structure - we are organising things so as to accelerate the global imperative embodied by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Now there is much more that flows from this baseline moral imperative. (Or "moral" imperative, as once realising it to be the case, we are then suddenly in the newly reflexive position of it becoming a choice.)
For one thing, it is a statement of moral liberalism. Basically our natural existence can't break the laws of thermodynamics. But beyond that level of constraint, the Cosmos no longer cares how we go about achieving this general goal.
Paint paintings or burn books. Both are suitably entropic activities. But in terms of our human capacity to grow negentropically towards our own collective social future, the two activities might turn out to have quite contrasting results.
In summary, there is virtually zero moral literature that takes the perspective of a "systems physicalism". Even Peirce struggled to say much about ethics (largely because he was still conflicted by the severe religiosity of his own social environment).
But note how it is a framework that gives equal voice to both ends of the lived spectrum of life - order and disorder, entropy and negentropy, co-operation and competition, simplicity and complexification.
It is a large enough model of Nature to encompass the full dynamics in play. You don't have to exclude one half to have the other. Instead you start with both (as complementary extremes of being) and discover life as it is lived in the world arising inbetween.
I'm actually very opposed to the Cartesian framing. There is no cognitans or extensa anywhere in my res. I support a panpsychist physicalism, like Galen Strawson, who says (like I do) that physicalism actually entails panpsychism. My physicalist ontology is most akin to that of Alfred North Whitehead, who was also a panpsychist.
But descriptive vs prescriptive is not the same divide as objective vs subjective, or as matter vs mind. It's a different thing entirely; see upthread about "direction of fit". They're each about the relationship between the world and our ideas of it, and differ in what function those ideas about it are meant to serve.
But panpsychism fails because it is just Cartesian dualism in thin disguise. It is an attempt to treat "mind" as a further substantial property of matter. And so a conflation of two mysteries rather than the explanation of either.
The systems perspective leads to what Peirceans would call pansemiosis - semiosis as a universal Nature structuring process.
Now we have a duality built around the scientific-strength concepts of information and entropy - a duality that is demonstrably two sides of the same coin. A single yardstick - physically anchored in the Planck scale - can measure what is happening on both sides of the "mental~physical" divide.
So panpsychism has always been based on parody physics. Sorry to be harsh, but Whitehead is hand-waving his way through quantum metaphysics (even if - like Bergson and other "emergentists" of the time, he was also a proto-systems thinker in many respects).
Pansemiosis is a reflection of where physics (and neuroscience) have actually arrived. The discovery of the unity of information and entropy that lies at the heart of the best existing theories of nature.
Friston's Bayesian Brain model in neuroscience made the breakthrough in describing the "information processing" of the brain in terms of "physical" entropy dissipation. Likewise, the whole of fundamental physics wants to do the reverse by using information processing as the way to model physically entropic reality - such as all the stuff about holography or quantum information.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, I saw that bit leaning towards a triadic systems logic. So we are more likely to agree on that.
With "direction of fit", now we are working with the three things of two asymmetric poles of being and then their contrasting modes of interaction - the relationship that sustains the whole deal.
My story would be that the "world" and the "self" arise as two sources of constraint on our individual action. The world is all of that outside which we can't simply wish to be different. We have to work with its concrete material possibilities. Then the "self" is the internalised social construct which stands for our cultural backdrop. It is a second set of constraints on our action that is an encoded set of useful habits when it comes to navigating the hazards and opportunities of the world in a generally pro-social way.
In a pre-Cartesian, pre-science, time, the two sets of constraints were largely mixed up as one. We viewed the physical world animalistically and magically - an extension of the cultural world. It is only with a hard Cartesian divide that the physical world and the spiritual world became two different things, and a world as "nature as culture, culture as nature" became a disappearing framework.
So there could be a lot of tidying up to do on that part of the argument, as well as some essential agreement, in my eyes. But the foundations are what matter as a first step.
Not the way I do it. I’m vehemently against supposing that there are additional mental properties in addition to physical properties. As I construct it, the mental and physical are two different perspectives on exactly the same stuff.
The point though is that that’s a different pair of things than the pair of descriptive and prescriptive.
I've heard every version of panpsychism. Different perspectives on the "same stuff" remains Cartesian unless you can truly dissociate your position from a substance ontology and shift to a process ontology.
In the one, stuff just exists. The goal of monism is achieved by granting that stuff some kind of fundamental duality (of properties, aspects, perspectives, whatever).
In the other, stuff is a condition with a developmental origin. The duality that concerns us is something that isn't fundamental but must eventually emerge. So the monism, the unity, has to come from triadic closure.
And that is what pansemiosis achieves as a model of reality.
The account doesn't assume its conclusions by just granting the duality as a fundamental ingredient of nature. Instead it is a based on a logic of development where a dualised state of affairs is what emerges due to a visible feedback relationship, an actual semiotic theory of how things are caused to be this way.
So do you have a formal theory of how fundamental stuff came to be dual-aspect in the way you require? How did this state of affairs come about exactly?
If you apply that to all the times that you've used the term "moral" some things will begin to stand out... You'll reach incoherence and/or self-contradiction, and be forced to rethink how to better say some of the things you've said when using the term. It also dispenses with historical moral discourse and the taxonomy used within. The distinction between prescriptive and descriptive dissolves. All sorts of things change in one's logical train of thought when and if they hold to that. "Is" and "ought" are both sometimes a part of moral claims. I've briefly laid out some of this earlier... that part went unattended.
Hey apo!
:cool:
So. You said
Quoting Pfhorrest
As far as I'm following the OP you've listed all the meta-ethical positions you've read about, claimed that something is wrong with each one and asked what other people to...
Quoting Pfhorrest
But less than a page in, you're going to ignore talk on the exact topic you specified (whether these theories are insufficient) on the grounds that at least a large minority of people already think they are. I'm confused as to what would be left to discuss.
You seem to have declared all previous meta-ethics inadequate on grounds which you refuse to discuss ("some people agree with me so there's no matter here to be argued"), then revealed incremental parts of your solution (the flaws in which you, again, refuse to discuss). As I said earlier, this is not an appropriate platform for proselytising. It's a discussion forum. If you want to present you ideas in a format which is less open to critique you might be better off with a blog or something.
You seem to be reading way more into what I'm talking about than I am trying to say.
The fundamental elements of my ontology are interactions. For clarity, picture these as line segments, connecting two points. The interaction can be looked at from the perspective of either point: each point is, from its perspective, the subject of the interaction, and the other the object, but from the other's perspective it (the second) is the subject, and the other (the first) is the object. Neither of these is more or less right than the other, they're just different ways of looking at the same thing. "Mind" and "matter" in the floofy metaphysical senses correspond to those subject and object perspectives. (More substantial, ordinary senses of those words don't). There's no two kinds of stuff, just events that can be interpreted two ways, both objects (matter) and subjects (mind) emerging from bundles of those interaction events (which are respectively equivalent to properties of objects or experiences of subjects, depending on which perspective you take).
But this is getting way off topic. This thread is about moral semantics, not ontology, and I do plan another thread on this kind of ontological topic later. The only reason I've brought up ontology here is as a criterion for a workable meta-ethics, which shouldn't depend on any controversial ontological assumptions. By "compatible with physicalism" here I just mean doesn't require ontological commitments beyond the ordinary stuff virtually nobody disagrees with, rocks and trees and the like.
You seem to be making this very personal (as in about me) and being very uncharitable to my motives.
Quoting Isaac
Maybe "whether" was a weasely way to say it. I was trying to be welcoming in my phrasing, "hey guys lets's talk about this topic". Here's a more blunt phrasing: There are substantial chunks of people who find each of the listed positions insufficient, for reasons I've listed. I agree with all of their reasons -- even though they mostly disagree with each other. I want to discuss ideas with other people about what possibilities remain when all those reasons are accounted for. It looks to me like the three big reasons common to most of those objections are, as I said, that a position is not compatible with ontological naturalism or physicalism (divine command theory, non-naturalism), that it doesn't honor the is-ought divide (naturalism, descriptivism generally), or it doesn't allows for moral claims to be genuinely truth-apt and not mere subjective opinions (subjectivisms, error theory, and non-cognitivisms). I have some ideas for something that I think wouldn't run into any of those objections, I'd like to discuss them, and I welcome any other ideas toward that same goal.
That you think one of those objections isn't a very good objection is really missing the point, and dragging the conversation into a repeat of the same damn conversation that you keep bringing into every damn thread I make. It's almost like you're on a witch hunt for any philosophical claim that could allow for the possibility of moral statements being objectively right or wrong. The thread about architectonics wasn't even supposed to be about my principles of commensurablism, but you derailed that entire thread into harping on one half of one of the four of them: the half of one that allows for moral objectivity. So I made a separate thread to be specifically about those principles altogether, and... you still made the entire thing into harping on that same half of one. I skipped a whole bunch of other thread ideas I had because I expected you would just do the same to them (and that other old, tired arguments would come up and derail them, so it's not entirely you), and instead I made this thread to discuss the language even used to talk about morality and how it related to other non-moral language... and you've still made the entire thing into the same damn debate about moral objectivism. I want to talk about other things besides that, things that tangentially relate to that but aren't all entirely about whether moral objectivism is possible or not, and I don't want every attempt to talk about anything that comes anywhere close to acknowledging moral objectivism to get sucked into the black hole of debating with you whether that's even possible.
Quoting Isaac
Where have I refused to discuss flaws in the parts of my solution? Nobody besides @Tarrasque has even acknowledged those parts of the thread, and I'm responding to their criticism, not ignoring it.
Have you tried “The role of interoceptive inference in theory of mind,” by
Sasha Ondobaka, James Kilner, and Karl Friston, Brain Cognition, 2017 Mar; 112: 64–68. It doesn't cover all of what we might call morality, but it does tie Theory of Mind, empathetic responses, in nicely with Active Inference. I don't have a link, I'm afraid, but you might be able to track it down.
You shut down conversation about the actual issue. I'm interested in how people think (that's why I'm here). Your ideas about morality were put off limits, so I thought I'd explore your ideas about discussion. You can put those off limits too if you want, there's plenty of other people to talk to. You are free to completely ignore me if you don't like the way I discuss things, I routinely ignore some people here for exactly that reason, we're not here out of duty, it's supposed to be interesting, not drudgery.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You realise that's not just a 'more blunt' version, that;'s a completely different proposition. In the one you invite discussion about whether people find these reasons plausible, in the second you say you only want to discuss solutions to them with people who already agree that they are.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ha! That's really funny that you should put it that way, it gives an interesting insight into the other side of the coin, you think I'm on a witch hunt to destroy any philosophical claim of moral objectivity, it puts me as the active player (destroying the claims) and the people actually making the claims as merely passive. For me, of course, if you didn't keep setting up new threads to make the same claim I wouldn't have six different places in which to dispute it. To me it feels like you just really really want this system of yours to be accepted and everywhere some part of it isn't you say "I don't want to discuss that bit" and make a new thread about some other aspect of it. But each new thread you can't resist mentioning the parts you claim not to be discussing in the hope that they'll be thereby tacitly accepted.
I don't know you so I'm not making any claims to your personal situation, but as a psychological phenomena, it's very common in those who've turned away from religion in adolescence or later. Neural pruning early in childhood, I think, makes it difficult for those who've been raised with the idea of 'religious absolute truth' to deal with a world in which there's no such thing. They construct elaborate (usually pseudo-scientific) models to derive their replacement 'absolute truth' because they've simply no mechanisms to manage the uncertainty.
This may or may not be the case for you, I couldn't possibly know, but the thought processes which accompany these super-constructions, fascinates me. That's the reason why I engage with them whenever I find them. If that's a 'witch hunt' then so be it.
I shut down an attention-sucking tangent. Now this is becoming another and I would like to shut it down so that more productive conversation can take place instead.
Quoting Isaac
I would like to do that. Replying to you is drudgery and the apparent difference in our time zones means I only see your posts as I’m about to go to bed or first thing in the morning, making what I mean to be a pleasurable pastime something that feels like a chore instead.
You like looking into how other people think, maybe start a thread about why people like me feel obligated to try to give a polite and thoughtful response to everyone, and have such difficulty even politely steering a conversation without it exploding into bullshit like this.
It would be helpful to me if you would just not respond to me anymore, but if you have the same difficulty I do resisting the impulse to do so I guess I can’t complain.
Quoting Isaac
In only one of those threads was I actually making the claim that objective morality is possible, and even then that was just an implication of but one of four related claims the thread as a whole was supposed to be about. In the thread before that I mentioned those four an an example of the more generally kind of systemic philosophy I wanted to discuss, and didn’t want to debate those particular principles there yet. In this thread, I’m didn’t set out to argue that there are objective morals, just to explore a moral semantics that (among other things) doesn’t rule them out, as that is a common objection to many theories of moral semantics.
In the architectonics thread you made the conversation about the principles I meant only to be an example. In the spin-off thread about those principles it was more on topic, but you still made it entirely about that one small aspect of a much broader topic, which drowned out any discussion there might have been about the rest. Here, you’re again making everything about whether or not there ARE objective morals, when the topic is what moral claims even mean, and “that would rule out any possibility of objective truth to moral claims” is just one of several common objections to many positions on that topic.
Quoting Isaac
Philosophy is full of a bunch of topics that interrelate to each other. Views on one topic have implications on views on another topic. But to keep conversations manageable, and on topic, we can’t always go following every tangent wherever it leads and plumb the depths of all if philosophy. If a view on one topic depends on a view on another topic, we need to be able to say “yes, it does, and that is my view on that topic” and then get back to the topic at hand instead of turning it into a debate about the that other topic.
I do think there are objective morals. All of my views on other topics are going to be consistent with that view. That doesn’t mean that every topic I talk about has to devolve into a debate about that one implication of the larger system that my views on that topic are a part of.
Curious as to what both debaters think about the following statements.
As a child, pain is objectively bad. So is suffering, starvation, dehydration, neglect, abuse, etc. Any who disagree well I'm frankly curious. As I'm sure others would be. Basically why is what is bad for you, not bad for someone else? Because they're not you? Because they look different?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Excluding the obvious question of 'why are they the few'. Is the idea without value? If a town of 10,000, with 9,000 infected with some sort of lethal contagion with no cure but who don't think they are, not worth erm.. neutralizing to save the 1,000 who would have perished otherwise?
Curious. Thanks.
It depends what you mean by 'bad'. Pain, hunger and other physiological states are states whose causes are external to the mind responding to them, it can only infer the causes of those states and some response (aimed at minimising the degree of error in that inference, but that's not important right now). The brain is arranged in cortices each with a heirachical relation to others. What you have with the application of the term 'bad' is one end of one section of a very long collection of inference models - in this case, the end where you decide what term in your language is best used in your effort to communicate something. By necessity, the selection of this term is contextual and non-exhaustive of the mental states associated with pain, hunger etc.
So saying pain is bad is superficially nothing more than to say that "bad" is an appropriate term to use when one is experiencing pain, it's an statement about correct language use, not morality.
If you look at the issue more behaviourally, we might say that we tend to avoid 'bad' things. This gives us some observable action associated with 'bad' to take the matter outside of mere semantics. We don't have to accept a behavioural equivalent, we could associate some area(s) of the brain and use fMRI, or something. Either way, we see complications immediately, because young children do not avoid that which is painful. In fact, in cases where caregivers also produce pain, they can even, unfortunately, seek it out.
So at the very least, we have a range of physiological affects which some cortex of the brain tries to model the cause of an present to the next level cortex. At each point some interaction with the modelled causes may be initiated, there's no reason at this stage why any such response would need to be coherent with the other models.
One of these responses might be to talk to other people using the term 'bad'. There are scores of other responses not accounted for by this particular expression, many of which may also result in verbal expressions, not all of which we'd even expect to be part of some unified conception.
No problem. I've also just noticed your link in another thread to the Cheryl Misak lecture which I didn't know was available (her work on Ramsey is really interesting), so all round a good day for the accumulation of electronic resources.
I’m just interested how you think Panpsychism can work. Where’s the detail?
Quoting Pfhorrest
How would you test this hypothesis? What perspective would reveal the experiential aspect of a stone?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Cool.
But it is of course a nonsense claim. As I said, the proposition is absurd. You may as well ask me what it would mean for morality to be made of cheese. I assume the religious answer would involve souls and divine plans somehow.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If you want to understand a bottom-up theory of morality, you have to ask what moral questions look like in such a theory, and why, and whether that corresponds to observation (empiricism). Some examples:
- is 'the cold-blooded murder of ginger people is good' true? What moral reference frame can that possibly be true in? None.
- is 'wearing a cauliflower leaf on your head on a Tuesday is good' true? Can there be a moral frame of reference for this? Yes. Is there a real person, culture, group with that perspective? No.
- is 'silence is good' true? Can there be a moral frame of reference for this? Yes. Is there a real person, culture, group with that perspective? Yes.
Reasonable questions might be: does this describe the world? are there situations where it doesn't hold? can we understand our moral ideas this way? Unreasonable questions are: who is right and wrong? what makes their good good? since these assume objectivism in a relativistic theory.
The thing is, other than gods not existing, it seems no less absurd to me than your claims about what is “the phenomena underlying our morality”. It’s that “underlying” relationship that seems vague and unclear to me. I get the descriptive explanation of why we have certain moral intuitions, that’s perfectly clear and uncontested. What I don’t get is how you get from us having those intuitions to any manner of evaluating moral claim, UNLESS it’s simply that any way anyone is inclined to morally evaluate anything is correct simply by virtue of them being inclined to evaluate it that way.
So... if there were gods, and they did something that made us inclined to evaluate things certain ways, would that then make them the phenomena underlying our morality? Or, if they didn’t actually MAKE us inclined, but just gave orders and offered rewards and punishment, would that be enough?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The Nazis though the cold blooded murder of lots of different groups was good. “Ethnic cleansing” in general is seem as good by the people who do it, hence the superlative “cleansing”. I would not at all be surprised if some society had or would support the murder of all gingers.
What makes them wrong? Or more on topic, what does it mean to say they are wrong, or that they are right?
If your meta-ethics isn’t capable of handling the true claim that Hitler did something wrong (even though he and his society thought it was right), then that looks like a pretty serious problem.
As I understand it, our original conceptions of good and bad in childhood are based on what feels good abd bad. Two gamechangers are the development of empathetic responses, which I have read are astonishingly profound in many cases, and the ability to identify agency. 'It is bad for me to cut my finger' becomes 'It is bad for Alice to cut her finger' and 'Billy cutting my finger was bad' which become 'Billy cutting Alice's finger is bad' and finally 'Billy is bad for cutting Alice's finger'. It is one of many model-building capacities we simply exercise without the necessary intervention of reason.
This extends to socialisation. Punishment is an apt example: Drawing the crayon mural on mum and dad's bedroom wall felt great, but the judgement, the yelling, perhaps the hitting afterwards felt bad, so drawing on people's walls becomes bad. We're forced to identify ourselves as the agents of the bad thing, say sorry, be told we are bad. This too is added to our mental model of morality.
From that model we can draw conclusions about our behaviour and that of others. To us these seem at least approximately objective, that we have learned some things about the world. Until we meet someone with a different model.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I've never been religious, you're better placed than I am to describe how such people think it works. It never made much sense to me. I gather some people believe that the Bible is the source of our morals, which I assume means that pertaining to what is moral or not: the ten commandments, the teachings of Christ. The underlying reality would presumably be God's divine plan. 'Good' is then good-for-the-plan by definition. To ask whether an element of this is really 'good' just because it's part of the divine plan is erroneous, since that already assumes that good is other than that which is good in the theory entertained. This is merely a mangled way of saying that 'good' is actually something else.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again same problem. You assume there must exist objective truth values for moral claims about Hitler's actions, and measure any other moral theory with respect to that. But a different theory to yours is only obliged to account for what we see, not what you think.
In fact Hitler would be classified as antisocial. Whatever frame of reference Hitler measured 'good' in, it could not be a moral one, since it was not based on any human social capacity. (One could argue he had some sociality, given his welfare reforms, but then again not, since he sent millions of Germans to die for no reason.) Part of our sociality is how we deal with antisocial elements. In more natural circumstances, Hitler would have been attacked, exiled or murdered. His safety to proceed with exceptional antisocial ambition was a result of power. Power is a perversion of sociality, in which the better instincts and older, more social cultures are subdued, overruled, corrupted and destroyed for the good-for-me.
But that's not the real issue for you I feel. If everyone in the world ever except for Hitler and his thugs agreed that Hitler was immoral, and if the better angels of their natures were really individual empathy and drives for reciprocity and natural intolerance toward the Hitlers of the world, that would not be sufficient to capture how immoral Hitler was. What I suspect you want is not a multitude, even an infinitude, but something singular: a one off, infinitely authoritative 'Hitler was evil'. I think that's understandable because he's an extreme case, and I think that understanding what morality is at root should satisfy that: he was categorically immoral imo.
As you are evidently a meticulous thinker, I will have to try my best to act as one in turn. The level of detail in your posts will delay my responses.
I did catch what you wrote about impression vs expression. If I understand it, it follows this neatly symmetric(quite pleasing if true!) world-to-mind vs mind-to-world dichotomy of thought that you are positing. By your account, an "impression" is a speech-act that is world-to-mind, and an "expression" is a speech-act that is mind-to-world. It is when we begin to explore the "correct/incorrect" and "true/false" distinction that I lose your train of thought. I'd like to refer back to something else you said about the importance of direction of fit: "it may be the same picture, but its intended purpose changes the criteria by which we judge it, and whether we judge the picture, or the thing it is a picture of, to be in error, should they not match."
I'd also like to borrow a quote from Wittgenstein: "The world is all that is the case." What I take it to mean is that, essentially, if one knew the conjunct of all true propositions, they would be lacking nothing in their account of reality. What it means for something to be true is that it is the case, and what it means for something to be false is that it is not the case. As you correspond "true/false" to descriptivism, I imagine you're inclined to agree. I expect that you might respond with a mirror image of this sentiment, perhaps something like "If one knew the conjunct of all correct intentions, they would be lacking nothing in their account of what-ought-to-be. What it means for something to be "correct" is that it ought to be the case, and what it means for something to be incorrect is that it ought not to be the case."
With that in mind, let's hop back to your quote. We have a picture. We wish to judge whether this picture is in error. If the picture is mind-to-world, it is of the usual descriptive sort. It is attempting to depict something factual. Note that, as described, this is strictly a two-way interaction between mind and world. In judging the picture as erroneous, we note that the idea is divergent from the content of the world. But what if the picture is world-to-mind? Now, it is of a prescriptive sort. We would expect that, given the symmetry yet distinction between these two types of claims, we would proceed through inverting the judgement used in the descriptive case. We would judge the world as erroneous for diverging from the content of the picture. I believe you say as much when you establish that the descriptive-prescriptive divide dictates "whether we judge the picture, or the thing it is a picture of, to be in error, should they not match." Again, this is a strictly two-way interaction between mind and world. What if we apply this to moral judgement?
Instead of a picture of what ought to be, we are now dealing with a claim of it: "it ought to be the case that Russia launches nukes" This is a world-to-mind judgement. Therefore, if the world does not match the mind(I imagine that in this case, that would look like "Russia is not in fact launching nukes"), we judge the world to be in error. This, on its own, entails relativist conclusions. This presents a problem. I expect that you would respond to this problem by claiming that "it ought to be the case that Russia launches nukes" is an intention uttered in error, since it ought not to be the case that Russia launches nukes. At this point, mind-to-world can no longer be considered symmetrical to world-to-mind. Instead of the two-way relation between world and mind that we explicitly find in the mind-to-world case, we are forced to introduce some further arbitration to account for the fact that even in a world-to-mind judgement, the mind can be mistaken in some further way besides simply not matching the world. As opposed to mind-world, we have something like world-mind-standard. You might accept this asymmetry, but it harms the parsimony of your theory to do so. Of course, I would avoid this issue by wholeheartedly accepting that moral states of affairs exist, and utterances concerning them are beliefs which can be true or false in the regular way.
Sure, you can explain that modus ponens that way. I actually found this response quite persuasive on the first reading, and thought I might have to abandon this line of analysis. On further reflection, I found your explanation lacking when applied to other moral modus ponens. First, let me structure your account of the logical relation in argumentative form:
P1. It ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(stealing happening))
P2. If (getting your little brother to steal) then (stealing happening)
C. It ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(getting your little brother to steal))
It certainly seems that if one were to accept P1 and P2, yet reject C, they would be succumbing to a logical failing. This accounts for the logical force of modus ponens. It is also intuitive that yes, if I get my little brother to steal, stealing is happening! Your alternative P2 seems synonymous with my original P2. In that sense, it can be argued to be semantically identical to the original syllogism. That is why I considered your response sufficient to resolve that particular modus ponens. However:
P1. Stealing is wrong
P2. If stealing is wrong, then cheating on a significant other is wrong
C. Cheating on a significant other is wrong
Let's translate into your proposed logical language.
P1*. It ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(cheating happening))
P2*. If (cheating happening) then (stealing happening)
C*. It ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(stealing happening))
Something isn't right here. P2 is translated incorrectly. The meaning of "If stealing is wrong, then cheating on a significant other is wrong" is totally different than the meaning of "If (cheating happening) then (stealing happening)." The relation that you originally proposed(getting my little brother to steal entails stealing happening) does not accurately explain WHY moral modus ponens is valid. Let's translate P2 more faithfully.
P2**. If it ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(cheating happening)), then (it ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(stealing happening))
After this translation, I'm unsure why you'd have to invent a different logic for dealing with prescriptive claims at all. "Stealing is wrong" and "It ought not to be the case that there is stealing happening" are identical claims by your view anyhow. In response to the bolded text, I concur that we can treat "is" and "ought" interchangeably in syllogisms as far as logical validity is concerned. Where we diverge, however, is that you seem to think that this is in every case meaningful. I believe that many, if not most atomic sentences produced by swapping "is" with "ought"("the sky ought to be blue," "the earth ought to be round," "a certain star a million light years away ought to be mostly hydrogen" "a triangle ought to have three sides") are nonsense in normative terms.
This satisfies me. Well put. If there are in fact any prudential reasons that do not collapse to moral reasons, I can't think of one right now.
This, I find much more problematic. You could rephrase moral oughts descriptively in the same way: "If you don't lie to people, you are more likely to be morally correct." The fact remains that rational normativity is used extensively in language, and not just by term-confused laypeople. We tend to believe that people ought to be rational - that they ought to aim to believe only true things, they ought not to hold obviously contradictory beliefs, they ought to afford greater consideration to good reasons rather than bad ones. You might suggest that these collapse to moral oughts, holding that we only value rational norms because to forsake them would result in great unpleasantness for us, or something like that. I think this is defensible, but dubious. I suggest the opposite - that what is moral is merely a subset of what is rational. When I consider your arguments for your position, I am considering reasons. I might have good moral reason to agree with everything you say and shower you with compliments. This would certainly make you happy, if you believed it to be sincere. It may be supererogatory, but if all reasons are moral reasons, what does it really mean for something to be supererogatory?(I saw your chart, but that raised more questions than it answered. Why is "bad" contained within "supererogatory?") The thing that I have the most moral reason to do would always be the thing that I have the most overall reason to do, by definition. Why do people disagree at all in cases when agreement would result in a morally preferable state of affairs? Perhaps they are responding to reasons which are not moral in nature, and indeed may be stronger than whatever small moral reason they have to abandon their argument and agree.
For instance, take this principle: "If another person is meaningfully disagreeing with you, and you know that they cannot be convinced of your position, you ought to concede." Morally, this is justifiable. Continued disagreement without even the possibility of agreement is pointless. It serves only to create strife and tension, which is not a preferable moral state of affairs. Would it not be advisable to change your beliefs and eliminate this tension? Surely you have no moral reason to choose a true belief over a false one, unless holding this false belief itself somehow harms people. This could even be avoided. I could become a "round-earth constructivist," believing something like "the earth is truly flat, but we must act as though it is round for the best results." I could adopt this belief because I have good moral reason to do so: dissolving tension with flat-earthers who cannot be convinced. Is a principle like this the one you have the most reason to follow? Is concession, changing your beliefs when you are certain your interlocutor will not change theirs, the thing you have the most reason to do?
But yet, everybody's senses in all circumstances could still lead to something false. There might be things which are true of the world and yet empirically unverifiable, even in principle, like the existence of a god. As an epistemological verificationist principle, I suppose this is really as good as it gets. But as a principle for defining what is actually true/false, correct/incorrect, this lacks in the same way that a traditional "ideal rational observer" account does.
Woah, woah. Descriptive statements are pushing a considered thought about how everyone should think things are? That itself is prescriptive! I also think it's inaccurate. Consider a color judgement. I have a degree of red-green colorblindness. If I make a descriptive claim such as "this chair is brown," I would sure hope I'm not implying that everybody else ought to see the chair the way I do! I am merely reporting how I observe the chair to be.
Soundness alone is sorely inadequate. Not all sound arguments are on equal justificatory footing.
Just out of interest, what sources are you relying on for this take?
I didn't note sources, sorry, but I'll do what I can.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So the first part of this is, I think, uncontroversial: children show signs of distress well before they show signs of responding to others' distress. [There are exceptions. Babies react with distress to the sound of other babies' distress. It's worth remembering that some phenomena, like babies crying, are inevitable and can therefore be selected for, while others, such as Billy pulling Alice's hair, are not.] The magnitude of this development of what amounts to the total of cognitive and emotional empathy, as well as the development of empathetic responses, are summarised here: http://local.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/emot/McDonald-Messinger_Empathy%20Development.pdf which has a good starting-point bibliography for more reading.
In terms of how children build social models of morality, you can take a look at social learning theory, such as Aronfreed J. Conduct and Conscience or Rosenhan D. Some origins of concern for others (1969). Old stuff, but still regularly cited. (Probably best to look at review papers that cite those.)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So this is stage 1 of Kohlberg's moral development schema: pre-conventional morality, in which moral rules are implemented pragmatically to avoid punishment. (Obviously moral rules can also be implemented to increase rewards, however, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out in his psychology of risk work, we are much more risk-averse than reward-oriented.) Kohlberg's model is quite old, but it's still relevant, i.e. still cited across the board in papers on child development of morality. It's also very broad, so more modern research (such as that above) should hold more weight.
Quoting Outlander
When I was a kid I remember falling on my bike a few times - probably from going too fast - and scraping my knee. Pain can help someone learn their limitations, and not just for children. By and large though these things - suffering, starvation, abuse - definitely seem bad. But there are cases where due to someone going through these things they came out a better, more mature person.
Thanks. I think you'd enjoy some of the more modern works on child development. There's been a considerable amount of progress since the likes of Rosenhan and Kohlberg, much of it up-turning the older models quite radically. Alison Gopnick has written a few good books 'The Scientist in the Crib' and 'The Philosophical Baby' are the best, I think. Alternatively I can give you some paper recommendations if you prefer the original sources. Either way, I think you'll find the developments interesting.
If, on the other hand, you've already read all that and just disagree with it, then ignore the above and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's very hard from a few posts to judge someone's investment in a topic. One doesn't want to seem unhelpful, but on the other side one need avoid being condescending - apologies if I miss the mark.
Yeah I've read some of Gopnik and Meltzoff. The Scientist in the Crib was a recommendation I was going to give you, but I find books aren't usually very helpful in these sorts of discussions. Review articles are best I think, as they both summarise and cite the broadest range of research. Both Gopnik and Meltzoff have done work on how children develop causal inferences and how they construct the sorts of cognitive structures I was talking about, some of which is summarised in that first link, which I recommended more for its bibliography.
I'm not aware of any radical overthrow of Kohlberg's stages themselves. His interpretations are old hat, but the empirical data and the broad structure and concepts of his theory are still cited regularly today. It is, after all, just Pavlovian learning, something even babies are capable of, and which will always precede any learning based on later psychological development. But if you want a better citation, there's Schultz, Wright & Schleifer (1986) whose experiments also showed that knowledge that X leads to punishment precedes knowledge that X is immoral.
Most of Gopnik's work, together with say, Tania Singer's and Karen Wynn is about overthrowing Kohlberg's stages. Newborn babies show empathy, one year olds show signs of Theory of Mind etc... I'd be very interested to hear what you got out of those advances if not the up-turning of Kohlberg, always interesting to hear a different perspective. I'm not sure this is the place for it though, I've already had one slapped wrist for derailing the thread, I don't want to incur another.
To step in and quickly clarify the science of panpsychism, I've got a theory as to how it probably works that I posted as a brief essay on this site, its the OP of the thread: Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, the Reality Possibly. Not at all proven yet, but is based on some solid research and in my opinion very unlikely to be inaccurate in the essentials. How plausible do you find it?
Terrible job done then, since Kohlberg is still cited regularly to this day and his terminology (e.g. "post-conventional") is well and truly in the mainstream. Variations on the same theme still go strong, through Hoffman's four-stage system which also has full empathetic development at adolescence, to Commons & Wolfsont's seven stages which more or less maps to Kohlberg's but with the emphasis on development of empathetic capacity rather than moral practise, still identifying the same key stages of non-systematic efforts to help, interpersonal development, and reciprocal altruism. Details have changed, much has been filled in, but at the end of the day data is data: babies do not slop out as fully formed moral agents; they arrive at that in stages.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I mentioned the findings about babies to you already above. In the literature I've read, these are considered precursors to empathetic reactions: they are not the complete hardware and software ready and rolled out day one, and they're certainly not considered fully formed moral models. I don't think any of that is too surprising: we are biologically wired for empathy, altruism and detecting causality. It would be weird if child development went: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, EVERYTHING!
See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999
Thank you! And no worries at all about delay. Finding time to do anything on my own (i.e. not hanging out with gf who is locked down with me) is increasingly difficult for me these days myself.
Quoting Tarrasque
Nope! Two different orthogonal divides, the distinction between which is critical to my account. Direction of fit is about the kind of opinion (descriptive or prescriptive), and impression vs expression is about what you’re doing with that opinion relative to someone else (just showing them what opinion is in your mind, or trying to change the opinion in their mind). You can impress or express either kind of opinion, descriptive or prescriptive. If anything, expression is more description-like because it merely shows what your opinions are (so is like describing your opinions), while impression is more prescription-like because it tells someone to have certain opinions (so is like prescribing your opinions). But they are still orthogonal: you can express your beliefs, impress your beliefs, express your intentions, or impress your intentions.
Quoting Tarrasque
Very nearly! If true/false are being used in the narrower descriptive sense then I agree with Wittgenstein there. “Correct/incorrect” I use as broader terms that don’t have that descriptive connotation, so they can apply to either beliefs or intentions. A correct belief is a true belief. And a correct intention is a good intention. (In looser language that e.g. a Kantian might use, what I call a “good intention” would be called a “true moral belief”: a correct cognitive opinion with world-to-mind fit). The conjunct of all correct (good) intentions would be a complete account of morality, in the sense of what-ought-to-be. And what it means for something to be “good” is that it ought to be the case, and “bad” vice versa.
Quoting Tarrasque
I must admit I have noted this apparent asymmetry before and struggled to reckon with it. It makes me feel like there is something I haven't fully developed right. When it comes to my approaches to assessing the correctness of either beliefs or intentions, I do end up with a nice symmetry again, but it feels like some bridge between the symmetry of meanings and the symmetry of assessment is missing, for the reasons you state. So I'm glad we're talking about it, because this is the kind of situation where I usually come up with newer, better thoughts.
The symmetry I end up with for assessing the correctness of either kind of opinion is checking the opinion against experiences, where experiences come in different varieties that carry their own direction of fit: experiences with mind-to-world fit are sensations (like sight and sound), and experiences with world-to-mind fit are appetites (like pain and hunger). In both cases, assessment of the objective correctness of an opinion needs to account for not just the experiences you are actually having right here and now, but all the experiences anyone could have in any context.
I think perhaps the missing bridge that avoids the asymmetry you note -- and this is just me thinking on the fly here, not recounting thoughts I've already had before, so thank you again for prompting some new thought -- is that direction of fit needs to be reckoned not so much as a relationship between the mind and the world, as it usually is, but rather as a relationship of these different descriptive and prescriptive models to our overall function from our experiences to our behavior. We don't have direct access to the world, all we have is the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it.
Being interactions between ourselves and the world, our experiences of either kind are about both ourselves and the world: sensations tell us about how things look to beings like us in certain circumstances, appetites tell us about how things feel to beings like us in certain circumstances. The direction of fit is more between those self-regarding and world-regarding aspects of the experience, internal to the experience, than between the mind and the world itself.
To most beings, the "is" and "ought" aspects of experience are completely intermixed: the world does something to it and that immediately prompts it to do something in response. Sentient beings, on the other hand, differentiate our experiences into those to be used to build a "still life" (mind-to-world-fit picture), our sensations, and those used to build a "blueprint" (world-to-mind-fit picture), our appetites. Sapient beings, furthermore, reflect upon those pictures and assess whether they have correctly constructed them.
We then behave in such a way as to bridge the difference between the two images we've constructed: to change things from the "still life" (mind-to-world image) to the "blueprint" (world-to-mind image). The two images can thus be defined in terms of their role in driving our behavior: one is the "from" side of the change we're making, and the other is the "to" side.
This doesn't fall into relativism because in principle both of those images can be constructed in an objective manner, taking into account not just the experiences you are actually having right here and now, but all the experiences anyone could have in any context.
Quoting Tarrasque
This doesn't seem to be a logically necessary premise in the same was as "if stealing is wrong, getting your little brother to steal is wrong". So it makes sense that you wouldn't reconstruct that in the same way as the brother implication, as "(stealing) implies (cheating)", because that's incorrect; there could be stealing and not cheating. (BTW I think you reversed those a couple times in your post, not that it makes a big difference). Your reconstruction as -- to use my shorter nomenclature from earlier -- "be(not(stealing)) implies be(not(cheating))" is thus a better reconstruction than "steaming implies cheating". But that is then a questionable premise because it's not a logical necessity, as you're just saying:
be(not(cheating)) or not(be(not(stealing)))
or equivalently:
not(be(not(stealing)) and not(be(not(cheating))))
because material implication is counterintuitive like that, unlike logical implication.
Quoting Tarrasque
For the same reason that "false" is contained within "contingent": supererogatory = not-obligatory, and all bad things are not-obligatory, just like contingent = not-necessary, and all false things are not-necessary. (There are some things that are necessarily false, but that just means impossible; likewise, things that are "obligatorily bad", so bad you are obliged not to do them, are just impermissible).
Quoting Tarrasque
I disagree. When it comes to the limited domain of descriptive propositions, I agree completely with the verificationist theory of truth: a claim that something is true of the world yet has absolutely no empirical import is literally meaningless nonsense. If something like gods can really be said to exist, there must be something observable about them.
Quoting Tarrasque
This mostly boils down to the difference between impression/expression and prescription/description clarified at the start of this post. That "should" there is more an "impressive should" than a "prescriptive should"; natural language can be sloppy, again.
But in response to both this and the large part about the normativity of reasons generally that I didn't quote earlier, I now remember that I have in other contexts thought about normativity as it relates to thought more generally, not just about prescriptive thoughts like intentions, in my work on philosophy of mind and will.
Basically, the reflexive process of self-judgement involved in forming "thoughts" (beliefs and intentions) involves casting both our descriptive and prescriptive judgements upon either our descriptive or our prescriptive judgements. When we (descriptively) look at what we perceive (descriptively) and judge (prescriptively) that it is the correct thing to perceive, that constitutes a (descriptive) belief. When we (descriptively) look at what we desire (prescriptively) and judge (prescriptively) that it is the correct thing to desire, that constitutes a (prescriptive) intention.
So you're right, there is normativity/prescriptivity involved in reasoning generally, that I was forgetting about earlier.
The prescriptivity involved there is still ultimately the same kind as moral prescriptivity, though. It's basically a case of considering what the proper function of a human mind is -- proper as in good, good as in prudential good, which we've already established boils down to moral good -- and then looking upon yourself in the third person, so to speak, and thinking "Hey, there's a mind! Is it functioning properly? No no, it should be perceiving like this and desiring like that instead..." It's self-parenting. Parents teach their kids how to think, both in terms of figuring out what is true and in terms of figuring out what is good, for the moral good of those kids, and everyone they'll have an impact on, right? Likewise, making sure we ourselves are thinking correctly is ultimately for a moral good too.
Quoting Tarrasque
That would be an expression, not an impression, as clarified at the start of this post.
Thank you for this engaging conversation! No rush on your response, it'll take me a while to get to it anyway.
Both Hoffman and Commons published over two decades ago. A lot has changed since then, and Kohlberg's methodology would laughed out of the office these days if it were a new research proposal. Psychology is not like other sciences where there's a clear set of theories which match experimental data and a clear set which don't. A lot of interpretation relies heavily of the model framework through which it's analysed. Fo this reason you see a lot of psychology textbooks and courses still citing older models in much the same way philosophy papers will track the history of an idea. It doesn't mean they think those models are still the best approach, it's just that it's important to track how we got to where we are so that the assumptions are obvious. I can guarantee you that neither Kohlberg, Hoffman nor Commons will be taught on a modern Child Development degree without detailing the extent to which their assumptions have been shown to wrong.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Exactly. So weird in fact, that no-one has even bothered testing such a model. So the entire debate is about when and how developmental stages take place. Kohlberg got the when and the how wrong. There mere fact that development takes place in stages was not Kohlberg's invention, nor even Piaget's. No one ever even questioned that assumption, so it's not true to say their work is still relevant simply because people still talk about staged development. The issues are the rate of progress, the path taken and the influences effecting that progress.
Your field is Physics I believe. Imagine if I cited some old ideas about black holes or quantum mechanics and you said "Oh there's been a lot of new developments since then", citing the latest research and I just said "Oh yeah, but these old guys are still cited so your new lot haven't done a very good job have they?". I think we both know that's not how science works.
Data doesn't expire. Ideas are developed, rarely overthrown. That's not how science works, except on TV. No, if you referred to a 40 year old theory that is taught in college courses today, that is written about in books today, that is still regularly cited to this day, whose ideas are still present in the current vocabulary, I don't think I would patronize you about it even if I disagreed with it, especially if you were referring to it as common knowledge, and especially if you also cited later research. Rather, I'd cite something that I thought contradicted you. Wouldn't it be simpler and better to post something that's more up-to-date that contradicts what I wrote?
It does in psychology. When research methods are shown to be flawed, or problematic (such as Kohlberg's), the data coming out of that research is considered less robust than it was.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed, but the aspects of the ideas of Kohlberg relevant to this discussion are the degree and form of socialisation involved in the development of morality. It is exactly those aspects of his overall idea which have been 'developed'.
I only thought you might be interested if you hadn't already heard about it, and then was surprised to hear you suggest that it doesn't really change things and wanted to know more about why you thought that. No one's patronising anyone. I'm just confused by your answers, that's all.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
As I said, I only thought you might be interested in some newer research, nothing more. I really wasn't expecting such an odd exchange.
Kohlberg's data is known to be limited. This is why his interpretation which generalised more than it could is faulty. (For instance, Kohlberg wrongly defends the timings of stages which are not seen in different cultures.) But you'll find that in most psychological research and it's done quite deliberately now. One has to control for variables not under study that might affect the outcomes. This is particularly important in small sample sizes. Gopnik is worse than Kohlberg at this in some ways. She typically uses very small sample sizes that are dominantly from one demographic but includes a small number from others, then only breaks the data down by gender. Kohlberg's data at least tells us a lot about Western white boys, being based on large samples of Western white boys. Gopnik's is harder to assess because she over-relies on small samples without controlling for some of the very variables that Kohlberg has been shown to invalidly generalise to.
Quoting Isaac
Right, and less so Kohlberg's explanation or generalisation of it, which is not consistent with my description. So to the extent that I agree with Kohlberg that there exists a stage of child development of morality in which classical conditioning precedes the child's ability to morally rationalise -- which by no means excludes their demonstrated elementary empathetic capabilities -- what do you think exists in Gopnik's research that demonstrates this not correct? That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Quoting Isaac
I'm totally open to newer research; as I said, Gopnik and Meltzoff's ideas were what I had in mind for how children build moral models, and Meltzoff was one of several citations in that first review I sent you. It seems odd to me to infer from an additional reference to older, still cited theory that my awareness of child development ended in the 80s. I don't mean this in a "you hurt my feelings boohoo" way; it's just an odd response, although it would perhaps make more sense if you could state why you think Gopnik ruled out punishment as an element of moral development, or rule out that it precedes moral reasoning. There is up-to-date research you can read on this in APA's journals that demonstrate that this sort of associative learning not only occurs, but is effective.
Anyway... we've probably derailed the thread enough :rofl:
I think you've misunderstood my intention regarding the reading suggestions, I meant literally nothing more by it than that you might be interested, and was even careful to acknowledge the possibility that you'd already read these studies and had your own opinion on them. That really is all there is to that, I don't understand how it got so misinterpreted, but I apologise for being confusing. Let's leave that there.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm not really interested in presenting my own position on the matter. I've spent a 25 year career in psychology (and my wife's a psychologist too, so it didn't even stop when I got home!). At no point in time in those two and a half decades have I ever managed to convince anyone of a viewpoint they were not already amenable to. Our data simply isn't robust enough to have that kind persuasive power such as you might find in physics or chemistry. If you want to believe in an 'Obedience and Punishment' Pre-conditional stage, nothing I present will have sufficient gravity to dissuade you. Just think about the quality of evidence from Kohlberg which persuaded you in the first place - a few answers to hypothetical dilemmas...
If you're looking for alternative ways of looking at this, I'm more than happy to discuss, but if you want me to deliver my stunning coup de grace, you'll be disappointed. I've really nothing more to offer than that there's another way of framing this that's equally valid.
What interests me far more is how you arrive at your beliefs, especially if you've read the more modern research, what compels you to stick to an obedience and punishment model? What attracts you to that idea. Most of my comments are only engineered to find answers to those sorts of questions I'm afraid.
I don't particularly. I don't think punishment says anything more than how punishment works. It's not a general theory of child development, just an example selected at random of how children begin making associations between behaviours and badness before, or rather as part of the process that, they have fully-developed rational models of morality.
Quoting Isaac
No need dude, didn't mean it in an angry way. I'm pretty sure you've read more into what I was saying than I intended, and it sounds like I've misread what you were saying in response to boot. 'thappens :)
Yes, that's the bit I was interested in. The idea that children make associations between behaviours and badness before they have fully-developed rational models of morality is not necessitated by the empirical evidence. It might be the case, it equally might not. There's nothing so powerful in the literature to compel any rational person to fall down on one side or the other; so there needs to be something more than just Kohlberg's experiments that's made you think this way. It's that I'm wondering about.
I think this is somewhat back-to-front. If children were fully functioning moral agents from day one, that would be distinguishable, not just in the data, but in everyday experience. That isn't what is observed. It wasn't observed by Kohlberg. It wasn't observed over the last twenty-five years by Tomasello. The delayed manifestation of second-personal agency (~3 yrs), and the further delayed manifestation of reasoning about groups, inductive moral reasoning and moral self-direction (~5 yrs) are not consistent with the hypothesis that children are, even if fully equipped, fully functioning moral agents. But structured "naughty step" type punitive measures do have short-term efficacy before this.
So, just to explore these beliefs... Say I could present evidence of babies exhibiting second-personal agency, would you prefer that to be the case? You'd have a choice then - look for the flaws in this new evidence I presented (there will be flaws), or accept that it demonstrates Kohlberg et al are not necessarily right, and so open up alternatives. Which would you choose? (or just decide you're not going to waste your time indulging me in hypotheticals - up to you, of course!)
Yeah man, chuck it up. It'll be interesting to discuss.
It was a hypothetical. I'm not so much interested in discussing the actual papers (you've clearly got a very broad grasp of the issues in developmental psychology, but, as I've said, I only find these kinds of discussions worthwhile under very limited, usually professional, circumstances. Online it's just too much effort for too little gain). I was just trying to get at whether you felt compelled by the evidence to take the stance you do, or otherwise. Can I ask, did you have some other theory before reading Kohlberg. Did he compel you to change your original position, or did he confirm what you already suspected?
I think you're overstating my position on Kohlberg. I referred to it because it's a well known system and I just happened to have selected punishment as an example. There are other, later ones (including Tomasello's), but, while there's a lot of overlap, they don't all focus on the same things. I actually get the impression that punishment is a touchy subject in psychology, but it's par for the course in parenting research and teacher training.
Gopnik's analogy between how children build models and how science theorists do so is compelling, which is why I was surprised that you thought that not only were Kohlberg's explanations wrong, you thought that his punishment stage was overthrown, because I've never seen Gopnik really touch on that subject. (Again, happy to learn otherwise.) Tomasello, unsurprisingly, a huge influence, although I think he makes up for lack of knowledge about our ancestors by looking to modern humantiy which, as you know from my other posts, I think is a mistake. Sapolsky, obviously.
I won't be able to get to this until tomorrow, but in advance of that, can you outline what kind of null hypothesis you'd have were you to test something like the absence of second-person agency concepts in under 3s, or the necessity of a primary stage of moral development associating behaviour with punishment. What sort of thing could I show you that would compel you to discard Kohlberg's first stage, or some similar developmental theory. I don't want to focus necessarily on Kohlberg, just the general picture of what you see as satisfactory evidence in this general regard.
The reason I ask, bringing it slightly back round to topic, is that it seems to that the way people use terms like 'bad' are instrumental to their concepts. We can ask the linguistic child whether X is 'bad', but we're doing little more there than checking they can use the word correctly... the word we just taught them to use. But what would it mean to say that a pre-linguistic child associated punishment with 'bad' behaviour, or that they felt 'bad' when punished? If we make assumptions based on their responses then we're begging the question in the later studies. If we don't, we've no data to base any extrapolation from.
Lockdown, eh? If you're in America right now, my heart goes out to you.
I was making the mistake of necessarily associating impressions with prescriptions and expressions with descriptions. Thank you for your helpful clarification. Description(belief-level) and prescription(intention-level) are what I really care about here. Impression and expression seem unimportant. Most utterances have both an expressive and impressive aspect, do they not? If I say, "There is a truck right there!" I am both revealing my belief that there is a truck, and imploring my listener to share my opinion. Not only this, but a proposition can have neither aspect. Imagine that we find a piece of paper with "the Earth revolves around the sun" written on it. We could imagine, however unlikely it may be, that this writing appeared by chance: bugs crawled onto the paper and died in just such a pattern, or something equally implausible yet possible. There is no expression or impression involved. We can still evaluate this proposition as true or false. We could do the same with a moral sentence. What significance do impression and expression have?
I agree with this assessment. Also, I'm glad that I'm not just running you through the same argument-counterargument loops you've probably dealt with a thousand times on this forum! I definitely have more challenges to your line of thinking in store. You're certainly challenging mine - I don't usually engage in this type of written exchange at all, and of course, the contents of your theories are almost entirely new to me.
I went back in the thread to where you explained your views on feelings, and gave that section a few close readings. The trouble in walking this tightrope of symmetry is to ensure that one side of your dichotomy does not simply reduce to the other. Let us compare appetites and sensations. A complete physical description of my brain would include both my sensations and my appetites. I realize that hunger is not the only appetite, but it is the one I will use as an example here. My most basic "ought"(I ought to be fed) is grounded by an "is"(I have the brain state "hunger"). What is this relationship? Is it supervenience? Is it necessity? Is it equivalence?
Let me be more precise: it is not that I have the brain state "hunger" that matters to us. I infer from what you've said above("all the experiences anyone could have in any context") that what matters is not my appetite, but everyone's idealized appetite were they in my situation. The fact remains that the resulting "ought" is reducible to a collection of appetites, which are themselves describable in terms of physical brain states. Depending on the relationship between the "ought" and the brain states, the below might be a valid deduction:
P1. All beings like us would have the brain state "hunger" in situation Y.
P2. I am a "being like us" in situation Y.
C. I ought to be fed.
Here, we have jumped the is-ought gap. Ordinarily, we would require a premise like:
P3. Beings like us with the brain state "hunger" in situation Y ought to be fed.
However, if P3 is reducible to P1, we do not need P3. The "ought" would be intrinsic to the "is."
According to verificationism, unknowable noumena(things-in-themselves) do not exist. Given this, it is unclear to me why you feel the need to distinguish between "the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it" and "direct access to the world." Verificationism would hold that an idealized version of the former is identical to the latter.
Now, let's return to sensations and perceptions. The thing of most note here is the concept of "beings like us." Let us apply your truthmaking method to its intended context: differences between the perceptions of humans. First comes the brute observation of the individual. This takes the form of me seeing a ghost. Second, we compare this to our ideal aggregate's experience. Beings like me, in the situation where I saw a ghost, would not see a ghost. This is a discrepancy between how beings like me(with proper function) perceive the world, and how I perceive it. Therefore, "I saw a ghost" is rendered false.
Where this gets interesting is with the introduction of beings entirely unlike us. We can imagine aliens who perceive the world drastically different than we do. They could experience appetites and sensations wholly separate from the ones humans experience. Does this entail relativism about descriptive truth? Such an alien must compare their experience with beings like themselves, not beings like us. Their conjunct of all "true"(re: empirically verifiable to beings like them) propositions might overlap with ours, but there would be things we can verify that they cannot, and things they can verify which we cannot. Can a proposition like "objects take the form of shapes" be true-for-us but false-for-them, or even more confusingly, true-for-us but nonsense-for-them? Are neither of us lacking in our description of reality, since reality just is our relative ideal description? Or, are we both aiming at an underlying truth and coming away with only part of it?
Of course there can be stealing without cheating! My premise P2 is false, but this is inconsequential in a discussion of logical validity. An argument with false premises can still be valid, and a theory of logic has to account for why it is valid. I think there is some confusion over my point here, so I will elaborate on it further.
Consider a symbolic modus ponens:
P1. A
P2. A > B
C. B
So long as A and B are standing in for propositions, this argument is valid. Now consider my original moral modus ponens:
P1. Stealing is wrong.
P2. If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong.
C. Getting your little brother to steal is wrong.
This argument seems valid in the usual way. My second example(the one with cheating) was to demonstrate that your alternative account of the above's validity(it's valid because little brother stealing entails stealing) does not actually explain why the argument is formally valid. What I showed was that even if "B" does not entail "A," the argument is still valid, and trying to apply your explanation of "B entails A"(in that case, cheating entails stealing) fails.
There are several approaches you might take to explain moral modus ponens. First, you could accept that these propositions are truth-apt in the regular way. Then, moral modus ponens is the same as any common variety modus ponens. Second, you might hold that moral utterances are not truth-apt propositions at all. They might serve a purpose that is not purporting to report fact, such as expressing an attitude. This is the view of moral emotivists. The moral emotivist encounters the following serious problem:
P1. Stealing is wrong(expresses Boo, stealing!)
P2. If (Boo, stealing!), then (Boo, getting your little brother to steal!)
C. (Boo, getting your little brother to steal!)
The first issue here is that the atomic sentence in P1(can be represented as "A") is used to express a sentiment, while the same exact sentence does not do this in P2. By saying "If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong" I am not expressing an attitude towards the antecedent. Therefore, "A" as an atomic sentence in P1 and "A" as the antecedent of a conditional in P2 have different meanings. In P1, "stealing is wrong" expresses an attitude towards stealing, but in P2, it does not. This breaks the law of identity(A=A) which is obviously necessary for modus ponens to be valid. This is called the Frege-Geach problem, and while you are not an emotivist, I believe that your theory needs to be wary of it as well.
The second issue is that, even if the first issue is ignored, it is not clear that the relationship between the the premises and the conclusion is one of validity. If I accept P1 and P2, then reject C, am I failing logically? It seems that I am merely violating some kind of moral rule(Don't do what you boo!) concerning my attitudes, rather than a logical one. I may hold inconsistent attitudes, but am I making a logical mistake?
My original intention in introducing this line of analysis was to apply the first issue of the Frege-Geach problem to your theory. If you are claiming that moral propositions serve not to report fact, but to perform an act of prescription, you are vulnerable to this issue. While in an atomic moral sentence(Stealing is wrong!) I may be prescribing something, in the antecedent of a conditional(IF stealing is wrong, then..) I am not prescribing anything. My utterance of this sentence does not commit me to an attitude on stealing. This puts the law of identity on fragile ground, as explained above.
You might say that using moral sentences in regular formal logic is some kind of mistake, since they are "correctness-apt" rather than truth-apt, and we should be using a system that you have constructed as part of your theory to explain them. Not only does this require significant justificatory legwork, it is unclear why we should be compelled by the "schmogic" of moral propositions, or hold such "schmogic" in equal standing to regular logic.
If you are using supererogatory to merely mean "not obligatory," this is idiosyncratic. It means "above and beyond the call of duty" or "to a level far exceeding what is obligatory." I'm not one to argue about the definitions of words, as they mean what we want them to mean, but if you are going to use a customized version of a word, it is usually best to clarify before employing it.
Here is my challenge to the verificationist theory of truth. You hold that for something to be true, it must be empirically observable. I take you to mean observable in principle, as this is the strongest form of the claim. From our discussion it is also clear that you believe the "empirically observable" and the "physical" to be one and the same category. For something to be empirically observable, it must be physical, as our empirical methods interact only with the physical world. If something is physical, it exists, and if something exists then true claims can be made about it. For true claims to be made about something, it must be empirically verifiable, as you have stated. Therefore, if and only if something is physical, it is empirically verifiable. If I can provide an example of something that is physical yet not empirically verifiable(even in principle), verificationism becomes quite untenable. Such a damning counterexample seems to exist.
Consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We are confident that we can know either the precise position or the precise speed of a particle at a given time, but not both. A particle is a purely physical entity, and facts about particles are physical facts. I can ask this question:
"Knowing this particle's current position, what is its current speed?"
The answer to this question is empirically unverifiable, in principle. By measuring the particle's position, we necessarily prevent ourselves from verifying its speed. Must we conclude that the question is nonsense? This seems especially unintuitive when we consider that we could have chosen to measure the particle's speed instead. If we had done so, its position would be unknown to us. Can a question about a physical matter of fact become nonsense moments later? If we are verificationists, we must concede that at the time of measuring the particle's position, to ask of its "speed" is nonsensical, referring to a property that does not exist. This is certainly not what physicists conclude here. Rather, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle establishes that there are physical matters of fact which are empirically unverifiable.
If verificationism is true, we have complete information about the particle each time we measure it. What would the Heisenberg uncertainty principle be stating if there was nothing to be uncertain about? I think that this alone is enough to do away with verificationism, but I will provide further reasons which I consider to be overdetermining.
Defining verificationism without reference to a separate truth seems problematic. Why do we not appeal to the consensus of what we have, in fact, empirically verified? Well, because we know our methods are flawed. We must instead appeal to the consensus of our "idealized" methods. An idealized method is one where any mistakes we make are eliminated. A mistake is an inaccuracy. An inaccuracy to what? To the truth? How do you define our ideal methods of observation other than "the ones which accurately capture the truth?"
Causality cannot be proven true empirically. Are questions about causality nonsense? Our investigations into the material world are predicated on all sorts of assumptions that are, themselves, empirically unverifiable. I am hard pressed to imagine us building a search for truth atop a foundation of nonsense.
The past is empirically unverifiable. Whether or not a certain dinosaur ate in a certain spot sixty million years ago is a matter of fact that we are incapable of observing. The same can be said of whether Charlemagne had an even or odd number of hairs on his head, or whether a man in New Zealand stubbed his toe last week. Should we conclude that questions concerning these subjects are literally not truth-apt?
Some people consider verificationism self-defeating. The claim "empirical verification is the only way to learn truths about the world" is, itself, empirically unverifiable. That means, by your account, that someone asking "Is empirical verification the only way to learn true things?" is asking an unintelligible question. The statement itself cannot be true or false.
Moving on,
How can you establish that holding true beliefs is always morally better for us? I can't imagine such a stance being grounded in the "appetites," which you tout as the foundation for moral imperatives. A man being cheated on by his wife experiences no harm, so long as he remains unaware. Discovering the affair is what causes him hedonic harm. Here, one benefits from holding a false belief. Yet, we still believe it is morally wrong to cheat when your partner doesn't know about it.
Consider believing in a benevolent, all-knowing god. It is plausible that I could live a life where I purely benefit from having this belief. When my life goes poorly, I can keep my chin up, believing that it's all a necessary part of god's great design. When my life goes well, I can attribute my good fortune to god looking after me, rewarding me for my virtue and compensating me for my hardships. This belief may be prudential(thus moral) for me to have, and for others to encourage me to have. Concluding otherwise requires an account of why truth is valuable separate from moral good.
If you are concerned with pragmatism rather than existential truth, it would seem most pragmatic to simply postulate abstract objects exist and move on from there. From the pragmatist perspective, who cares if they are real? They are useful. Their explanatory power, and the lack thereof of the alternatives, speaks for itself.
I am, and thanks.
Quoting Tarrasque
Impressions generally imply expressions, but not vice versa. You can merely express your opinions without necessarily impressing them on anyone.
Quoting Tarrasque
Expressions aren’t claims of objective truth — they’ll not propositions, as in they’re not proposing anything to anyone. They’re just showing something about one’s own mind. The main importance for meta-ethics is to distinguish my view from expressivism, where a major difference is that I don’t think moral claims are just expressing desires, but rather impressing intentions; which also implies an expression of intention, which intentions also imply some desires, but it’s more than just an expression of desire.
Impression and expression also clear up Moore's paradox, as I explained earlier. It seems paradoxical to say "x is true but I don't believe x", even though it's totally possible to disbelieve something that is actually true, and my explanation is that saying "x is true" impresses and therefore also expresses belief in x, which then contradicts the expression of disbelief, "I don't believe x".
The moral equivalent of that paradox would be the sentence "x is good but I don't intend x". It seems to me that what you intend and what you think are good are as inseparable as what you believe and what you think is true. It is possible to intend other than what is good, just like it's possible to believe other than that is true, but in saying something is good you implicitly express your intention that it be so, and so contradict the attendant explicit expression of intention otherwise.
But just as saying "x is true" doesn't merely express belief -- it's different from just saying "I believe x" -- so too saying "x is good" doesn't merely express intention -- it's different from just saying "I intend x". The difference between those things, in either pair, is the difference between expression and impression. "x is good" differs from "I intend x" in precisely the same way that "x is true" differs from "I believe x".
Quoting Tarrasque
This is the issue that I've been having trouble communicating to Kenosha and Isaac. I don't hold these "oughts" to be grounded in any "is". We can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something ought to be, just like we can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something is, but that account is not the reason why they feel or think that. We don't have to know anything at all about brains to go to our appetitive experiences as the ground of our "oughts", any more than we need to know about brains to go to our sensory experiences as the ground of our "is"s.
In the latter case it's rather transparently the other way around: we learn descriptive facts about brains empirically, by relying on our sensations, our "is" experiences. If we then used our knowledge about brains, gained through sensory observation, to justify using sensory observation, that would clearly be circular reasoning. The reliance on sensory experience comes prior to any description of the brain. Likewise, on my account the reliance on appetitive experience as the ground for prescription comes prior to any description of the brain.
Quoting Tarrasque
I'm not sure this is an accurate account of my account, because there could be differences between people that would make them have different appetites in the same situation. A moral claim is objectively true if it accounts for all of those different appetites in all different circumstances. Just like a really objectively true descriptive claim about the color of an object has to account for people with different kinds of color vision and different lighting conditions.
Quoting Tarrasque
Only seemingly, because of the misunderstanding hopefully cleared up two quote blocks ago.
Quoting Tarrasque
It's precisely that "idealized" that makes the difference. We don't, and can't, have a complete account of the way that the entire (possibly infinite) world would be experienced by all (possibly infinitely many) kinds of being. We only have the way that bits and pieces of it are experienced by beings like us. So we can't just take "the whole world, independent of all experience" (that non-existent noumena) and hold it up against "our picture of what the world should be like". We can only compare "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it is" and "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it ought to be".
Quoting Tarrasque
You experienced something, which you interpreted to be a ghost. Other very similar beings in very similar circumstances did not experience anything that they interpreted as a ghost. Whatever the objective truth is, it will need to account for your experiences as well; we don't just throw out your experience of seeming to have seen a ghost, but we need to account for why it seemed to you like there was a ghost, but not to others. Is something different about you, even though you're very similar to the others? If something different about the circumstances, even though they're very similar to the ones you saw? Or are they actually experiencing the same thing that you are, but you're just interpreting that experience differently than them? Maybe you and they both experienced the same sight, but you interpreted it as a ghost, while they interpreted it as a lens flare.
Quoting Tarrasque
That last bit. The parable of the blind men and the elephant is the illustration I like to use here. Three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory.
Quoting Tarrasque
On my account, it's not only moral utterances but ordinary descriptive utterances that are impressing an attitude toward the idea in question. We normally take your symbolic propositions "A" and "B" to be, by default, full indicative sentences, like "x is an a" and "x is a b" for instance. On my account, we abstract out the indicative-ness, the descriptive-ness, of those sentences, and deal with the gerund states-of-affairs "x being an a" and "x being a b". Then we can re-apply that indicative-ness/descriptive-ness, or instead apply an imperative-ness/prescriptive-ness, and the underlying logic goes unchanged.
So, given those gerund states-of-affairs above, this is the underlying syllogism:
P1. A
P2. A -> B
C. B
Spelled out, that reads (ungrammatically, because these are so far incomplete sentences) "x being an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x being a b".
To get the ordinary indicative/descriptive type of syllogism, we could instead write:
P1. is(A)
P2. A -> B
C. is(B)
Spelled out, that reads "x is an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x is a b".
We could instead make an imperative/prescriptive variation on it:
P1. be(A)
P2. A -> B
C. be(B)
Spelled out, that reads "x ought to be an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x ought to be a b".
This works perfectly fine in your brother-stealing example, because "x being an a" does imply "x being a b" in that case (so to speak; getting your brother to steal does imply stealing happening). But in the stealing-cheating example, I figured you didn't mean the ordinary English version to suggest that it is not possible to steal without cheating, only that the badnesses of them are connected. If you didn't mind that implication, then the above formalization would still work just fine: x ought to be not stealing, and x not stealing implies x not cheating, therefore x ought to be not cheating.
But if not, then you wouldn't want to translate that second premise as "x not stealing implies x not cheating" (gerund, equally applicable to descriptions or prescriptions, just stating a relationship between those states of affairs), but rather as "'x ought to be not stealing' implies 'x ought to be not cheating'". Symbolically, that would then be:
P1. be(A)
P2. be(A) -> be(B)
C. be(B)
Quoting Tarrasque
I didn't realize I was using a customized version of the word; I honestly just thought "supererogatory" was the deontic equivalent of "contingent". Doing some further research now prompted by this, I see that the word I really want is "omissible". I'll make sure to use that instead from now on, and change where I've mis-used "supererogatory" in the past where possible.
Quoting Tarrasque
Quantum physics is full of different interpretations, so I'm cautious to speak authoritatively about what all physicists think, but as I understand it, the uncertainty principle doesn't just say that we can't know position and speed at the same time, but that to the extent that we measure one, the other becomes literally undefined. A particle with a definite momentum has no definite position; its position is actually smeared out across space.
Quoting Tarrasque
To other observations. We're (rightly) cautious about the accuracy of our present beliefs because we haven't made all of the observations (and never can), and there may be ones that contradict what we presently believe. To assert that something is objectively true is to assert that there won't ever be any contradictory observations. We can never know that with certainty, of course, but we can think it is so, at least tentatively.
Quoting Tarrasque
Causality, like physicality, is part of the background assumption of objectivity that we have to make in order to go about the process of investigating what is real. We can't empirically prove that anything is objectively real, either, but the question of whether anything is objectively real is prior to the empirical investigation. Likewise, the question of whether anything causes anything else. Empirical investigation helps us sort out what kinds of things cause what other kinds of things, on the assumption that things cause other things in the first place and all our experiences aren't willy-nilly incomprehensible.
Quoting Tarrasque
According to current physics, that information does still exist in the universe, and so in principle those things are empirically verifiable, it's just ridiculously impractical to go about doing that verification. Although some of that information may actually be in principle inaccessible now, just like the position of a particle with well-defined momentum is, in which case yes, those facts about the past are actually undefined, just like most facts about the future. (As part of my views on the nature of time and on modal realism, I fully embrace that there are multiple possible pasts of any given present; pasts just rapidly converge to extremely similar states of affairs, opposite how futures rapidly diverge).
Quoting Tarrasque
This is why I only embrace verificationism explicitly within the narrow domain of descriptive truths. The principle of verificationism itself is not a description of the way the world is, but is something we settle on prior to even engaging in description. Much like the principle of objectivity, and its relation to causation, detailed above.
Quoting Tarrasque
The information about the cheating still exists out there in the world threatening the harm of its knowledge to the man. If it were possible (which it's not) to change the world such that all information about the cheating was completely eradicated, then that would be equivalent to changing the world to be one in which the cheating had never happened. And that would be a good thing, if you could literally undo past harms. But we can't, and knowing about them can be prudentially useful in preventing future ones.
Quoting Tarrasque
Such a person holding such a false belief may end up expecting the world to be different from the way it actually is, and so behave imprudentially because of that. (I have relatives with this exact problem, people who could act to make their lives materially better, but who use "God will take care of it" as an excuse to do nothing, and end up suffering for it). If it were the case that such a person could never encounter anything about the world that would be counter to this belief, then that belief would either actually be true, or just be empty. Nominally "believing" nothingness that makes you feel good is morally good, and factually not even wrong, so epistemically permissible, if inconsequential.
Quoting Tarrasque
If you mean abstract moral objects specifically, then what explanatory power do they have? They don't have any impact on how I should expect the world to seem, descriptively, to my senses, to be, so there's no use in positing them as descriptively real objects.
As for the usefulness of abstract objects in general, I do grant them a kind of abstract existence, just like I grant other possible worlds, because doing so helps to explain "why is this world like this?" That doesn't go against my empirical realist (physicalist phenomenalist) ontology, because I'm not a Platonist about them, but rather a mathematicist like Tegmark, but explaining that ontology is a long topic that I'm already planning for another thread.
Excited to get into epistemology and ontology threads when they come up. Are you a mod here or just a very involved user?
At face value, this seems patently false to me. Ex,
"Going to the gym today is good but I don't intend to go to the gym today."
Often, we recognize that things are good, but nonetheless intend otherwise. Conversely, it can't be said that we often recognize things to be true and yet believe otherwise. Alternatively, consider the guilty meat eater:
"Eating meat is wrong but I still intend to eat meat."
He may have come across a moral argument that convinced him that being a vegetarian is the morally right thing to do. He may still be a slave to his vices, or be insufficiently motivated by moral reasons. Nothing seems overtly paradoxical about this.
What I am concerned with is not the reason why a subject thinks something ought to be the case. I am concerned with what renders them correct, independently of whether they know they're correct or not. It is not an issue of justification. It is an issue of truthmakers.
"What would make 'murder is wrong' true?" Is a different question from "How can we know that 'murder is wrong' is true?" I am asking the former. Of course, you would say that these claims cannot be true at all, they can merely be correct. I don't think that your distinction between "correctness" and "truth" is particularly convincing, which I will address later in this post. Just substitute "true" for "correct," or "truthmakers" for "correctness-makers," wherever it is pertinent.
Let me throw out an analogy that you may or may not consider relevant to this part of our discussion. Consider consensus relativism: the idea that what is moral is what the majority of people think is moral. I would claim that this theory jumps the is-ought gap. It claims that because a certain physical fact holds(people think X is moral), we derive from that what we ought to do(people think X is moral, therefore X is what ought to be done). You might reply that just because I can give a causal/descriptive explanation for people's agreement, that says nothing about the reasons why they come to their consensus about what is moral. I would find this to be an unconvincing rebuttal: if it is the fact that they agree that renders certain acts morally wrong, this fact is a physical fact. If we conclude something about what we ought to do from this physical fact, we are crossing the is-ought gap. The issue arises because, in consensus relativism, the truthmaker of moral claims is consensus. Consensus among humans is a natural fact. Likewise, if it is some natural fact of humans(they have certain appetites) that makes X moral, we are getting an ought from an is. Now, unlike a lot of people who misunderstand the significance of the is-ought gap, I don't think Hume had the final word on morality. But your theory in particular seems built on strictly partitioning "is" from "ought," so I think the distinction being crystal clear and incontrovertible is especially important for you.
So, is everybody's appetite given equal weight? Bloodlust or sadism can be considered appetites. Some people have these appetites. How does your metaethical theory account for these? Are they not ruled out for being in the minority? If half of all people had bloodlust as a base appetite, how would this change ethics?
This is well put, and generally true. As a principle of epistemology, specifically constrained to physical matters, verificationism is about as good as it gets. What I don't see as plausible is the jump from "we can't possibly know everything" to "there is nothing outside what we can know." In fact, they seem to be borderline contradictory. If there is nothing outside what we can know, what are we failing to know when we can't possibly know everything?
This is great. I like this parable a lot, and wish I had thought of a comparable example myself. Let's imagine that, for whatever reason, communication between these three blind men is impossible. Clearly, they are all restricted in the ways in which they can examine the elephant. If the only consistent consensus each can form is with himself, why is his judgement about the elephant not accurate? Snake-man can only verify a snake, tree-man can only verify a tree, and rope-man can only verify a rope. If verificationism about truth is correct, none of these men are wrong. Verificationism would assert that, in such an allegorical case, there would be no underlying fact of "elephant." If they cannot confirm an elephant, there is no elephant. Does this not seem as intuitively false to you as it does to me?
This is the best interpretation of what I meant. This response does the best job at preserving formal validity. I want to preface wherever this part of the discussion goes by saying, in trying to consider an alternative account of logic itself invented by someone far more educated than me, I am getting in quite over my head. I have 5+ tabs of SEP open trying to figure out what is going on here. Miscommunication is very likely.
It is important to remember that propositions need not deal only in utterances. We could, again, imagine that bugs have died in the shape of words on some piece of paper to form a valid modus ponens. Impression would play no role in our evaluation of it.
My systemic objection here would be that classical logic works very well for us. An alternative account being merely internally consistent(if yours in fact is) does not give us sufficient reason to switch, universally, our understanding of classical logic to Pfhorrest logic. We would need a compelling case to conclude that when your position produces errors in classical logic, we ought to discard classical logic rather than your position.
Attempts to eliminate the importance of tense from logic have, I believe, been made before. They are highly contentious. The work of R.M. Hare comes to mind. "Semantic content" and "meaning" are closely connected concepts. Sure, "Close the door!" and "The door ought to be closed." and "The door is closed." and "You should believe that the door is closed." all can be thought of as different forms of the same primitive idea, "the door being closed." Can we conclude from this that the meaning of all of the above is identical? Can they be freely interchanged with each other, and all be represented by the same variable in a deduction? Formal meaning must be quite distinct from semantic content if we can conclude this. "All doors are closed" and "some doors are closed" are both merely quantified versions of "the door being closed," yet, differentiation between them in formal logic is incredibly important. In avoiding the Frege-Geach problem, you might leave yourself with an account of logic that is too fuzzy to be as useful as classical logic.
This is also where I will further explore your distinction between "truth" and "correctness." Typically, logic deals in propositions that can be true or false. Validity is a property of arguments that lies in the relationship between premises and conclusions, where an argument is valid only if the truth of the premises entail the truth of the conclusion. This relationship of entailment is core to logic. You consider the domain of what can be true to solely contain the domain of what is physical. Other domains that we might normally consider to be capable of bearing truth, such as matters of mathematics, logic itself, morality, and theology, you consider merely "correctness-apt."
You do not seem to object to logical arguments being built around "correctness" in the same way we might normally use "truth." That you would consider a moral modus ponens to be capable of validity at all requires "correctness" to have the same relationship with logical entailment that traditional "truth" does. It seems that the concept of truth, as typically employed, you have replaced wholesale with this notion of "correctness." Under your account, "truth" has therefore been reduced in scope to refer merely to "physical truth." It appears, then, that rather than identifying a supercategory above and including our typical term "truth," you have introduced a subcategory: "physical truth." This is why I would suggest abandoning the "truth/correctness" dichotomy entirely, and just referring to "truth" and "specifically physical truth." If correctness does everything that truth does in logic, it just is truth. We can cast aside "all truths are physical truths, all else is correctness" in favor of "some truths are purely physical truths, and these are relevantly different from nonphysical truths." Since you don't espouse a correspondence theory of truth, you don't have to account for anything that nonphysical truths correspond to. This change would not be problematic for your theory at all.
No worries, glad I could help clear that up. "Omissible" works much better, though I might even simply suggest "Nonobligatory." It stands in clear contrast with "obligatory," and I know you love your symmetries.
You make a good point. We ought to be cautious in speaking about quantum physics that we do not tread into "quantum woo" territory, given that neither of us know much about it. I was under the impression that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle established epistemic uncertainty, but if I am incorrect, I have nothing further to add to this line of argument. It may be legitimately indefinite - we might lack full information because full information does not exist to be had at at the moment of measurement.
I feel like that interpretation of the word "objective" kinda came out of the blue. I don't think that to say something is objective means it is incontrovertible. I would rather say, of a truth that no knowledge could ever be obtained to contradict it, that such a truth is "indefeasible." When it comes to "objective," it is most often used in contrast with "subjective." I defer to Derek Parfit's definition here, which I like a lot and I think really captures what we mean when we talk about things being objective:
"According to subjective theories, we have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present desires or aims. Some Subjectivists appeal to our actual present desires or aims; others appeal to the desires or aims that we would now have, or to the choices that we would now make, if we had carefully considered the relevant facts. Since these are all facts about us, we can call such reasons subject-given. According to objective theories, we have reason to act in some way only when, and because, what we are doing or trying to achieve is in some way good, or worth achieving. Since these facts are about the objects of these desires or aims, we can call such reasons object-given."
-Parfit, On What Matters vol. one
We could claim something to be objectively true(true independently of our opinion on the matter), and yet maintain that this claim is defeasible in the face of potentially undermining evidence. I do agree with you that we should never proclaim truths to be indefeasible, as this can be dangerously dogmatic. Kant argued something similar in his essay "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'" which I would highly recommend.
Yes, we assume these things to be true. That is what an assumption is: taking something to be true. That is an example of something we take to be true, and which might actually be true(things might actually cause other things, or they might merely correlate consistently), but cannot be empirically verified.
The idea that there are only empirical truths or definitional truths has its roots in "Hume's Fork," which asserted that truth neatly divides into the two camps of "matters of fact" and "relations of ideas." If you prefer, we could accurately describe the two camps as "synthetic a posteriori" versus "analytic a priori." I take it you believe something like this, since you said at the start of our discussion that mathematical truths are merely definitionally true relations of ideas.
Hume's Fork has since been refuted, thanks in large part to the work of Kripke, who introduced the necessary(re: analytic) a posteriori truth, and Quine, who put the analytic-synthetic distinction itself on dubious ground.
As long as information exists in the universe, it is empirically verifiable in principle? What about information that is moving away from us faster than the speed of light, at the edge of the observable universe? It is physical, yet empirically unobservable to us. Same with matters of the past - we are dealing with imperceptible matters of fact. If I say "Charlemagne had an odd number of hairs on his head," I might be correct on a guess. What would render me correct? If Charlemagne did, in fact, have an odd number of hairs on his head. Surely you wouldn't believe it impossible that Charlemagne might have had an odd number of hairs on his head? If you were to claim that it would be impossible for me to sufficiently justify a belief that he did, I would agree. However, holding these things to be undefined seems a harder bullet to bite than just admitting we can't know everything. Mystery is an aspect of the human condition, and we ought to become accustomed to it.
If everybody had to settle on verificationism about truth before even engaging in description, nobody engaging in description would disagree with verificationism. People do disagree with verificationism(in fact, it's by far the minority position), ergo, we do not need to settle on verificationism before engaging in description. If you construe "description" to mean "describing physical things," it is trivially true that empirical methods are the best methods to engage with empirical subject matter. But, not everyone makes this conflation. Most people think things can be true yet not physical. Only the most extreme skeptics doubt causality, yet even people working in the sciences doubt that verificationism about truth is legitimate.
We have plenty of reason to believe things that cannot be empirically verified: truths of math, logic, reason, and morality especially.
So, if we stipulate that nobody besides me and the other woman would ever find out about it, cheating on my partner would be morally permissible?
Imagine two worlds: In W1, the holocaust never happens. In W2, the holocaust did happen, but it happened 20,000 years ago and no traces of it remain to be observed by contemporary people. Do we have reason to call W1 better than W2? Should we prefer to exist in W1? I say yes. The suffering of people still matters, whether or not we can empirically verify that they suffered.
The existence of god is unfalsifiable, therefore god exists. This is a bad argument, but from the perspective of the man whose belief is never falsified, he may not be mistaken to make it. It is conceivable that there could be some fact which, if he learned it, he would cease to believe in god. It is equally conceivable that he could never encounter this fact. Some theses are just unfalsifiable: solipsism, simulation theory, god, Descartes' deceiving demon, and causal determinism among them. I would agree that believing in these things is rarely useful, and in that sense "empty," but any one of them may nonetheless accurately describe the condition of the universe. It may be the case that you are the only entity in existence. To argue that it could not be the case just because it could not be verified is unconvincing.
The explanatory power lies in the observation that we discuss moral facts the same way we discuss other facts. We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect. As you are discovering, reforming our language and logic to compartmentalize moral facts is a Herculean task. Some might call it unpragmatic. Postulating that when we say "slavery is wrong," we descriptively assign a property "wrongness" to an act "slavery," and do so either correctly or incorrectly, is easy. It reflects what we appear to be doing with moral language, prima facie. The only substantive objection you've offered to seeing things this way is the argument from queerness, which just asserts that moral facts seem too weird to exist. That's not something that would deter a pragmatist.
As I raised with Pforrest earlier, this is simply not true so a s a basis for believing prima facie in moral truths it's sketchy at best. Currently, a significant number of surveys show most people to be moral relativists (or at least not moral absolutists). Even if this were not the case, however, what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts". You have, however, in your assessment of those very moral facts just discarded the idea that what most people believe to be the truth about those moral facts is indeed the truth about those moral facts. This is a contradictory approach on the face of it. Likewise we could go the other way and ask whether most people believe prima facie that "what most people believe should be taken as being the case". I've no surveys to go on here, but I'd wager not many would agree with that, so even if it were true that "most people believe there are moral facts", adhering to our first principle would mean that we should not take this as reason to believe that there are moral facts.
Which part is simply not true? When I said this, referring to our use of moral language:
"We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect."
This has been true in my experience. Even moral relativists do this. They advance their various viewpoints, disagree about moral issues, and believe that others are incorrect(only relative to their own morality, rather than an objective one). People discuss topics we consider subjective, like how good certain movies are, in reasoned ways all the time.
That's surprising to me, considering that most people are religious. If this is true, it's still compatible with what I said above. People still discuss moral facts in the same way they discuss other facts. Relativists just believe these facts are subjective.
That would be a foolish principle! I am in agreement with you that "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts" is a bad argument. However, I do think that people are warranted in believing what seems to be true to them, until it is defeated by a stronger reason to believe otherwise. Appealing to consensus is useful to gauge what people generally believe. It should not be used as a guiding principle for determining what is true.
Have I? I don't think I've discarded what most people believe to be the truth about moral facts. If most people start with an intuition that "slavery is permissible," this intuition is what they have the most reason to assume until it is defeated by a reason to the contrary. This is not in contradiction with my assessment above, but in agreement with it.
I agree with you here. What most people believe is usually pretheoretical, so it serves as a weak basis for establishing truth. Most people start from what they intuitively believe, then encounter arguments and theories that challenge their view. Once they begin this process, their intuitions will often become something they no longer have reason to believe. These prima facie beliefs will have been defeated. Until they are defeated, we have sufficient grounds to hold them.
Maybe (although not in my experience), but you advanced this as evidence of us ascribing properties to objective entities (like slavery), so in the case of relativists they would not be ascribing the property 'wrong' but the property 'something I believe is wrong'. In order to take moral realism as prima facie true on the basis of it seeming to be how we talk about moral dilemmas, you'd have to present evidence of us mostly talking about moral dilemmas assuming realism, and that's just not the case.
Quoting Tarrasque
But this would seem to support the opposite of what you're saying. We advance reasons whilst talking about how good certain movies despite virtually all of us being of the opinion that movie preferences are subjective. So what this example demonstrates is that our mode of conversation (reasoned argument) and our use of terms like 'best' does not in any way indicate that we consider the underlying judgment to be objective. It's just the way we talk.
Quoting Tarrasque
Indeed. The question is what kind of thing here would constitute a reason to believe otherwise, and why this principle then doesn't just apply to moral judgements themselves.
Quoting Tarrasque
Then what should?
Quoting Tarrasque
I might have your position confused then, I thought you were arguing against moral relativism. I'm a relativist myself, so we're in agreement here.
Definitely never said anything about "objective" entities. I think that, even from a relativist standpoint, assigning the property "wrong" to "slavery" best explains what is happening in a moral judgement. If I say "the movie was good," I am assigning the property "good" to the movie. I am just doing so in a subjective manner. "The movie is good" might be true when spoken by someone who liked the movie, but false when spoken by someone who disliked the movie. Similar for something like "broccoli tastes good," or if you are a certain type of moral relativist, "murder is wrong."
We talk about moral facts assuming cognitivism, but not necessarily the kind of realism you're imagining. The case I have been advancing here is agnostic to the matter of strong moral realism. Cognitivism holds that:
(1) Moral statements are truth-apt(can be true or false)
(2) At least some of them are true.
Moral relativism is a cognitivist theory. Moral relativism holds that moral statements are truth-apt, and sometimes true. Their truth is dependent on subjective facts: different types of moral relativists might believe these facts to be an individual's attitudes, or the consensus of a society, or something like that.
Yes, moral cognitivism is compatible with moral relativism. The way we talk about movies gives us good reason to believe, prima facie, that our statements about movies are cognitive. I wouldn't infer anything from this alone about whether movie evaluations are objective or subjective.
I am not personally a moral relativist, but I was not arguing against moral relativism here. I was disputing Pfhorrest's version of prescriptivism, which makes claims to its own unique sort of cognitivism, even though how he has described it so far is not compatible with the tenets of cognitivism I mentioned above.
Our methods should probably depend on what it is we're trying to learn truth about. I can't confidently state some principle about how we can reliably come to apprehend truths in all circumstances.
So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?
Quoting Tarrasque
Well then those are not properties of the behaviour in question, they are properties of those regarding it. I suppose you could say that a property of slavery is that such-and-such a group of people think it's bad, but that seems like an unnecessarily clumsy way of just avoiding assigning the property to the person rather than the behaviour.
Quoting Tarrasque
Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?
Usually when the semantic content of a type of discourse is a certain way, we use that discourse in ways that match the semantic content. An example of expressivist discourse is cheering for sports teams. We see people yell "Go, Canucks! Woooo!" and take them to be expressing their approval for the Canucks. If we were going to assume that when people said "Go, Canucks! Woo!" they were actually meaning "The Canucks are the best team in the NHL." we would need a reason to do so.
"Murder is wrong" is structured the same as "The sky is blue" or "The economy is failing." If we were to take "murder is wrong" to be a blunt expression of "Boo, murder! Grrr!" we would need a reason to do so. We usually don't assume that people are making a category error in their speech. People's moral discourse couldn't be substituted for growls and cheers and retain the same meaning. I've never seen an expressivist who puts their theory into practice and changes their surface-level speech to match what they claim it means. Presumably, people would look at them very funny, and not understand "keeping promises is good" to be equivalent to "Wooooo, keeping promises! Hell yeah, woop woop!"
There are also formal issues with expressivism that make it less tenable, like embedding problems or the Frege-Geach problem.
Really? I think describing the property as being assigned to the person is far more clumsy. If anything, a relativist is assigning the property "Wrong-according-to-me" to "slavery," not assigning the property "Thinks-slavery-is-wrong" to himself. Again, compare to a color judgement. When I say that grass is green, the content of my sentence does not include myself. If somebody wanted to see if they agreed or disagreed with my judgement, they wouldn't check me for the property "thinks-grass-is-green," they'd check the grass, because that's where the alleged property "green" is. If color perception is subjective, we could disagree but both be right.
On what grounds am I dismissing appealing to consensus as a guiding principle for truth?
Well, presumably for the same reasons you dismiss it. Laypeople's views are usually uninformed and have not been subjected to serious scrutiny. Like you said,
I’m not a mod, and I’m not even sure I’m very involved here compared to others. I haven’t even been here a year so far. I’m just some isolated guy who wants to actually talk to other people about the philosophical system I’ve been brewing for a decade instead of just writing it down in my book that nobody will ever read.
Quoting Tarrasque
The distinction I make between desire and intention is important here. Being a slave to your vices is a case of your intentions not being causally effective on your actions, e.g. you mean to do something, you think you ought to, you resolve to do that, but despite that you just can't help but do otherwise, because other desires besides the desire you desire to desire override it.
This is analogous to mirages and optical illusions. Sometimes you perceive something, and you know that perception is false, you judge that your perception is incorrect, but that doesn't stop you from perceiving it anyway. You perceive something you don't believe. Likewise you can desire something you don't intend. As just like you might not help but act on some perceptions even though you disbelieve them (e.g. recoiling from a scary hallucination you know isn't real), so too you might not help but act on some desires you don't intend to.
Once again, natural language is a little sloppy, and I know this distinction is not nearly always maintained in ordinary speech, but in the ways that I'm distinguishing the concepts, to intend something and to think it's good are identical in the same way that believing something and thinking it's true are.
In the case of the gym example, if you honestly don't intend to go to the gym, rather than just not desiring to and expecting those slothful desires to win out, then that would suggest that you think there is some greater good than going to the gym that you would be neglecting, so you think you going to the gym today is not actually good (because in the full context you think doing so would be worse than not doing so), even if you think going to the gym generally is good.
Quoting Tarrasque
I get that, and that's what I'm meaning to address. The truthmakers of moral claims, on my account, are the appetitive experiences of things seeming good or bad in the first-person. Not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad. Just like the truthmakers of factual claims, on my account, are the sensory experiences of things seeming true or false in the first-person, not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming true or false.
This avoids solipsism or egotism, as I expect you'll object next, because you can either trust other people that they had the first-person appetitive experiences that they claimed to have, or go have those same experiences yourself if you don't trust them. In either case, it's that first-person experience that is the truth maker, not any third-person account of a fact that someone's brain is undergoing some process.
Quoting Tarrasque
Who or how many people is not relevant. But in any case bloodlust or sadism as usually defined would be desires, not appetites. Someone desires to kill or hurt someone else. That doesn't mean that a complete moral account has to grant them what they desire. But whatever raw experiences they're having that give rise to those desires, whatever kind of psychological pain or whatever may be behind it, those are appetites, and need to be satisfied.
The thing about appetites, unlike desires or intentions, is that they definitionally cannot conflict, because they are not about states of affairs, just experiences. The trick is to come up with some state of affairs that satisfies all those experiences. Just like sense-observations cannot conflict, only perceptions or desires can, because the latter are about states of affairs, while the former are just raw data, and the trick in science is to come up with some state of affairs that somehow satisfies all that sense-data.
Quoting Tarrasque
Think of it like this: There are no things that we could never know, but there are infinitely many things that we could know. Because we're starting with a finite amount of things that we do know, we will always have merely a finite number of things that we do know, and consequently infinitely many things that we still don't know. But all those infinitely many things we don't know are still part of the set of things we could know.
Consider natural numbers for analogy. There is no natural number that could not, in principle, be counted up to. But we can never finish counting all of the natural numbers. No matter how many we count, there will still be infinitely many that we haven't yet counted. But those are still nevertheless in principle countable: if we keep counting we will eventually count any number you'd care to name, but there will always still be more that we haven't counted yet.
Quoting Tarrasque
If there was truly absolutely no way in principle to ever tell anything about the object they're feeling than the things they "mistakenly" feel, then yes, those things would actually not be mistakes. But such an impossibly absolute separation of all experiences would also be them existing in literally separate worlds, on my account, so it's not all that weird that one of those worlds would have a snake, one a tree, etc.
It's important to keep distinct things that are "practically impossible" and things that are really and truly impossible in principle. There are lots of cases where it's "practically impossible" to verify something, but still actually possible in principle, and it's that in-principle that makes the difference. If you extend the "practical impossibility" to ridiculous lengths, you end up getting ridiculous-sounding conclusions, and if you take it impossibly far all the way to complete actual impossibility, you get ridiculous conclusions like these three men existing in actually separate worlds.
Hard-core physics already deals all the time with things that are practically impossible but possible in principle when looking to resolve apparent problems with its models. Like, information seems like it could be lost in black holes, which breaks some fundamental principles of quantum physics about the conservation of information, but a possible solution is that a particle falling across the event horizon causes (to be loose and visual about it) ripples on the horizon which affect the emission of Hawking radiation from that horizon, allowing in principle the information about what fell into the black hole to be constructed from the "completely random" Hawking radiation, via the implications of that about the ripples made in the horizon by the in-falling stuff. Of course nobody in practice is ever going to be able to gather enough data about the Hawking radiation coming out of a black hole to figure out some particular item that fell into it aeons earlier, but in principle it's possible and that's enough to save the principle of information conservation.
Quoting Tarrasque
In reading the message written in dead bugs, we necessarily interpret it as though it was an utterance. Part of what makes something an impression or an expression is the interpretation of the audience; really, it's more the audience's interpretation than the speaker's intention that conveys any kind of communication at all. A person makes noises with their mouth or marks on a paper and someone else sees or hears those and thoughts come into their mind in reaction, which may or may not have been the thoughts intended by the person who made those noises or marks, if (as in your example) there even was a person who made them.
So if you read what seems to be an impression written in dead bugs that happen to have died in that pattern, and you read it as an impression, not just as a meaningless pattern of dead bugs, then to you it is an impression.
Quoting Tarrasque
I don't mean my system of logic to contradict classical logic at all. I mean my system to be merely a way of encoding things in more detail, that can then be useful in making inferences.
It's like the switch from simple subject-predicate syllogisms to properly quantified modern predicate logic. Before modern predicate logic, a sentence like "every mouse is afraid of some cat" would be logically decomposed into the quantifier "every", the subject "mouse", and the predicate "is afraid of some cat". But that leaves it ambiguous as to whether there is one particular cat of whom all mice are afraid, or whether each mouse is afraid of one cat or another but not necessarily all the same one. In modern predicate logic, we would instead break it down into either "there is some cat such that for every mouse, the mouse is afraid of that cat", or "for every mouse, there is some cat such that the mouse is afraid of that cat". All the rules of logic that applied before still apply, but now we're capable of distinguishing these two meanings from each other, and reasoning about them differently as appropriate.
Likewise, in my logic, every ordinary indicative descriptive sentence "x is F" can be turned into "is(X being F)" and all the same rules of logic will apply to them. But if there was another sentence "x is G" where G is a predicate meaning that what it's applied to ought to be F, instead of treating that as a completely unrelated sentence, we could render it as "be(X being F)". You can do the exact same rules of logic to that re-encoding as you would with "x is G", but you can also see relationships between that statement and the statement "x is F" and generally other statements about x being F.
Quoting Tarrasque
I certainly don't think those are all identical in meaning or freely interchangeable. "is(S)" and "be(S)" mean very different things, they just have in common the state of affairs S. "be(x F'ed)" and "be(you F'ing x)" are also different statements, even though the later implies the former.
Quoting Tarrasque
I don't have any problem with talking about "truth" in the broader sense that you are. I only substitute "correctness" because to some people, "truth" implies descriptiveness, and I want to avoid confusion with them. You're absolutely right that there's two concepts here, a narrower one and a broader one, and I don't have any particular attachment to the terms used for them, just so long as they are distinguished from each other.
The narrower concept, though, is not specifically "physical truth", but "descriptive truth". On my physicalist account, those are identical, but for the purposes of logic, they don't have to be. Saying that there exist some abstract moral objects is a descriptive, but not physical, claim. It would be made true by reality being a certain way, by it being an accurate description of reality. Likewise any kind of claim about the existence of any nonphysical things: they're still claims that things are, really some way. There are other kinds of claims that don't purport to describe how reality is at all, though; most notable, prescriptive claims, that something ought to be, morally. I think that those kinds of claims can also be true in a sense, but a non-descriptive sense; hence I try to say "correct" instead of "true" to avoid possible implications of descriptivism, but I don't mind at all when others do otherwise.
(Besides its conflict with my physicalism, I would still object to moral non-naturalism because it's still a form of descriptivism, and so still tries to draw an "ought" from an "is": there are these abstract moral objects, therefore things ought to be like so-and-so.)
Quoting Tarrasque
I didn't mean that at all. I meant only an expectation that it won't be controverted. If you expect that something will be contradicted by later observations, or is already contradicted by observations from a certain perspective, then you don't think it's objectively true. So if you do think it's objectively true, then you expect that it won't be and isn't already contradicted, from any perspective. That says nothing at all about your degree of certainty in that expectation, just that, on the overall balance of things, that is your expectation.
Quoting Tarrasque
Something like it yes, but not exactly that. My fork would have three tines. In the middle are the relations between ideas, without any attitude toward them, neither claiming those ideas are correct to describe reality with nor correct to prescribe morality with, just that those ideas have those relations to each other. Then on one side are claims that those ideas are descriptively correct, i.e. "true" in the narrower sense; and on the other side are claims that those ideas are prescriptively correct, i.e. "good". I think both of those kinds of claims can be objectively evaluated by appeals to shared experiences, and the same kind of logic can be done to both, because the logic hinges entirely on the relations between the ideas, not on whether they are fit for description or prescription.
Quoting Tarrasque
I think the thing I said earlier in this post about distinguishing practical possibility from in-principle possibility addresses this.
Quoting Tarrasque
Sorry, I didn't mean that it's not possible to do description without first agreeing with verificationism, just that questions like whether or not to adopt things like verificationism are logically prior to any investigation about the world.
You might be interested in my previous thread on The Principles of Commensurablism, which is all about my basic philosophical framework that this meta-ethics / philosophy of language is in the context of.
(I spent that entire thread trying to disengage with Isaac and never got around to actually presenting an argument for those principles, but if you want to ask about them over there, I will).
Quoting Tarrasque
The practical vs in-principle thing applies here again, and is basically the difference between "would" and "could". But taking this as an example situation, if nothing bad could in principle ever befall your partner because of your actions -- if there was no chance of bringing home an STD, or of you abandoning or growing more distant from your partner over this other woman, or anything like that, if you and your partner's relationship went completely unchanged, other than her being mad at you -- would you really have done something wrong, or would she just be unjustifiably angry? Sure her being angry is in itself a bad thing, but anyone can be angry about anything, and that doesn't automatically make the thing bad; my girlfriend gets angry if I put the spoons handle-down instead of handle-up in the dish drainer, but that doesn't make it morally obligatory to do it her way.
I know I'm weird in not sharing the inherent sense of outrage about "infidelity" that other people have, and it's not because I want to run off and do it with other people myself, but because I'm just honestly not a possessive person. I've been in open relationships before and not felt jealous, unless it actually had negative consequences for me (like, she wants to go spend more time with him and leave me alone and lonely). If you got rid of all the negative consequences -- which may not always, in practice, actually be possible -- then I don't see how it would be a genuinely bad thing.
Quoting Tarrasque
This is where a lot of my core principles come from. When we get down to questions that we cannot possibly find an answer to, but cannot help but implicitly assume some answer or another by our actions, we have to assume whichever way is most practically useful to finding other answers. I rule out solipsism, egotism, all kinds of relativism and subjectivism, appeals to faith, authority, popularity, intuition, all kinds of transcendentalism, justificationism, and the reduction of "is" to "ought" or vice versa, all on those grounds: those are things we have to figure out logically prior to investigating the world, that an investigation of the world can't answer but must assume answers to, so we only have practical reasons to assume one way or another, and any assumptions that would leave us unable to proceed with any further investigation have to be rejected, and their negations assumed instead. Which negations are the core principles all of this is proceeding from, discussed in that other thread.
Quoting Tarrasque
My account expects exactly that, too. Those are features of moral universalism generally, not specifically of moral non-naturalism.
Quoting Tarrasque
There is the quite similar situation of the predicate "is true", or "is real". On my account, these kinds of predicates (wrong/right, false/true, bad/good, unreal/real, immoral/moral, incorrect/correct, etc) are not describing a real property of a real object, but a linguistic or mental "property" or a linguistic or mental "objects": they're saying what to think or feel about some idea or state of affairs. "Slavery is wrong" takes the idea of the state of affairs where slavery is happening and says to disapprove of it, in the same way that saying "slavery is real" takes the idea of the state of affairs where slavery is happening and says to expect to see it out there in the world.
Quoting Tarrasque
It's not just the argument from queerness, but a more general physicalism (there are practical reasons for both realism and empiricism, which amount to physicalism, which rules out the existence of non-physical objects), and also an even more general non-descriptivism (there are practical reasons to reject reducing "is" to "ought" or vice versa, which rules out translating moral utterances to descriptions of reality, be it a natural or non-natural part of it).
:clap: :point:
Quoting Tarrasque
:100: :up:
Quoting Tarrasque
In the broader sense of “true” instead of which I’m using the word “correct” for disambiguity (from senses of “truth” that imply description), it does.
Hey, don't be pessimistic about it. Are you going to publish? The only negative thing I would say about the sort of "theory-of-everything" approach you have is that it requires a reader to sacrifice more of their initial beliefs than a single, cohesive "theory-of-one-thing." It's a lot harder to convince someone to adopt a wholly unique theory-of-all-issues than, say, simply fit a meticulously argued panpsychism into their belief system. But, obviously, trying to fit it all together is an impressive undertaking.
This can be explained easily in terms of second-order desires. I might have a certain desire, but desire not to have that desire. In such a case, the "desire I wish I had" is not affecting my actions, but the "desire I do have" is. Being a slave to my vices might be my first-order and second-order desires conflicting. If X being good is a belief, I can sincerely hold that X is good and yet not intend to X. While I want-to-want-to-X, I unfortunately don't want-to-X.
This seems to imply that, in deliberating different options, only the maximal one is "good." This precludes the idea of deliberating between multiple good options. It doesn't follow that just because going to the gym is not the most good, it is not good at all.
"Going to the gym is good, but I don't intend to go to the gym." could reflect that I am not going to the gym because of a conflicting greater good, I agree. But, I can still cogently evaluate going to the gym as good, while not intending to do it.
So, if I understand you correctly, experiencing a first-person appetite is an irreducible ought. I'm still not confident that this is the case. The fact of my appetitive experience is a physical fact, even from the first-person perspective. If I were in pain, I could, say, go through an MRI and verify that I am in fact in pain. Of course, I don't need to do this to have the experience of being in pain. Similarly, I don't have to go through an MRI to verify that I am having a perceptive experience of looking at a painting. If where I have pain, I have an ought, there seems to be a relationship between "me factually being in pain" and "what ought to be the case."
In the same vein as above, do you think that
"I am hungry, yet I ought not to be fed." is some kind of paradox? If "I am hungry" entails "I ought to be fed," it must be.
Sure. Bloodlust could easily be defined in terms of an appetite, though. What makes hunger an appetite? It is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by an actualization through my sensations, in the case of hunger, me being fed. You classify pain as an appetite as well. It, also, is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by a sensory actualization. In the case of pain, the appetite is to be relieved of the pain, and a physical coming-to-be in accordance with my appetite satisfies this. Similarly, bloodlust is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by a coming-to-be of seeing someone else hurt. It might feel like an anger-based appetite of a sort. People do experience things like this. Consider the phenomenon of "cute aggression," where people often report wanting to tightly squeeze and hurt adorable animals. This cannot be explained at the level of desire, as people who experience cute aggression have no desire to hurt these animals. Their experience is at a deeper level, which can be contradicted/overridden by desires, and I believe it could be accurately construed as an appetite under your view.
Even if you don't think that humans have this bloodlust-appetite, you could imagine a being that does. We would still need to factor its appetite into our consideration under your theory. I find this to have troubling implications if sinister appetites "need to be satisfied," as you say. The idea of an appetite that necessitates the suffering of others does not seem inherently contradictory, impossible, or even hard to imagine.
This makes sense, and does a good job at resolving the apparent contradiction I had pointed out.
But there is still an elephant. They may not be making methodological mistakes, but their perceptions of various objects where there is in fact an elephant represents a deviation from what is actual.
Yes, this is an important distinction to make when discussing hypothetical situations. I defer to Parfit again here, where he draws the distinction between what is "deeply impossible," such as a square circle, versus merely "technically impossible," like teleportation. Your goal here seems to be to define a satisfying constraint for "in principle," so that when we say "something is true of the physical world if and only if it is verifiable in principle," we don't get lost in the weeds over what is merely practically impossible.
I definitely don't think that we necessarily interpret it as an utterance. "Expression" and "impression" seem to be, as you have so far used them, properties related to what a speaker is intending with their words. What you're now saying implies that if I take someone to be impressing a belief on me, they are in fact doing so.
In the case of the dead bugs, applying "expression" or "impression" in the intentionary sense is a clear error. What am I applying them to? The dead bugs? The piece of paper? If a piece of paper that was written on by nobody can cogently be claimed to impress/express beliefs, the terms become a lot less meaningful. I can similarly say that a mountain impresses on me the belief that it is large when I look at it.
As above, why then are impression and expression properties of utterances at all? They could be properties of anything that brings me to have a certain belief. Also, didn't you claim that the impression/expression distinction resolves Moore's paradox? With these clarifications, you will have to retreat to the weaker claim that they only resolve Moore's paradox from the perspective of someone who assigns impression/expression to the sentence in the same way that you have. If their evaluation of impression/expression differs from yours, they are still correct in taking Moore's paradox to self-contradict. You might be fine with this conclusion.
P1. be(X being F)
P2. If be(X being F), then be(Y being E)
C. be(Y being E)
This restructuring alone does not resolve the Frege-Geach problem. A statement of the formal form be(P being Q) is a prescription. Its utterance prescribes a state of affairs. This is clear in the case of the atomic sentence P1: be(X being F), or "it ought not to be the case that there is stealing," if you'd rather. Prescription is the semantic content of that proposition. In the context of the antecedent in P2(IF be(X being F), then...), the semantic content of "be(X being F)" does not prescribe. We see, then, that be(X being F) in P1 and be(X being F) in P2 have different semantic content. In classical logic, we would now have to use different variables to represent them, and our modus ponens would no longer be valid.
If you want to avoid this by "abstracting the prescription away" or something similar, that is where you would conflict with classical logic. The relevant semantic content of a proposition cannot just be abstracted away, or else we get things like "Close the door!"(an imperative) being logically equivalent to "The door is closed."(a description). The semantic content of a proposition is what makes it mean what it does. If you change relevant parts of that content, it becomes a new proposition.
The importance of using "truth," for me, is the consistency with the vernacular in logic. Formal logical relationships, most crucially entailments, are based in the truth or falsity of their propositions. Claiming that something is "not truth-apt" should imply that it is not evaluable in formal logic, not usable to form valid arguments, etc. Since you use "correctness" in the same way "truth" is used in logic, I think it is important to call it truth.
I don't see "physical" as analogous to "descriptive," for the reasons you state. The nature of how you conflate the two is a little confusing to me. I would expect that you would entertain that nonphysical facts could be described truthfully, if they really existed, but they do not, ergo descriptions aiming at them are false. "God is real" would not be some weird quasi-proposition that we can't make sense of, it would just be a false proposition. It makes less sense to hold statements concerning nonphysical descriptions as not truth-apt at all, as you admit these things could be made true by reality being a certain way.
I have your principle of descriptive truth down, I think: "X is a descriptive truth if and only if X is, in principle, empirically verifiable as true."
What I'm after is a similar principle for your establishment of moral correctness. "X is a correct prescription if and only if..." what? You have explained your idea of prescriptive correctness, but I've found these explanations a little vague. I'm looking for a definition of what "prescriptive correctness" really is, in the form of a principle, like the above for descriptive truth. I'd have trouble trying to just throw "appetitive experiences of seeming good or bad in the first-person" into a principle like that without horribly misinterpreting and butchering what you're saying.
Maybe some non-naturalist theories work like you say, but this is not a necessary feature of moral non-naturalism. If the non-naturalist claims "murder is wrong" is a fact, it is a normative fact. The relationship between "murder is wrong" and "you ought not to murder" is that "you ought not to do what is wrong." The non-naturalist has no problem assuming this premise, and neither do you. In fact, you seem to espouse(in agreement with many realist positions) that what is wrong is implicitly that which you ought not to do. If this counts as crossing the is-ought gap, then you cross it yourself when you hold "murder is wrong" as interchangeable with "it ought not to be the case that there is murder." Also, the is-ought gap in no way implies that there is some fundamental divide in our language between two types of diametrically opposed claims.
If you are going to assert that mathematical truths are merely truths of relations between ideas, belonging in the middle of your fork, you need to support that. This would require an account of analyticity. Distinguishing between "things that are true by definition" and "things that are true in virtue of a contingent fact" is much harder than you might initially think.
Somewhat, but also somewhat not. Take the example of information on the edge of the observable universe. It is, even in principle, impossible for us to verify that information. This is because part of what it means to be us is that we are here, and if we cannot verify some information from here or somewhere we can get to from here, it is not verifiable at all to us. You could stipulate that if someone was on the edge of our observable universe, that information would be verifiable to someone. So, in one sense it is verifiable "in principle," but it is not verifiable "to us" in principle.
My condolences.
The reason I chose infidelity is because it is a type of dishonesty, betraying a mutual expectation that is present in many relationships. Obviously, in a relationship where fidelity is not a value that a reasonable expectation is built around, infidelity is not a serious transgression. I found the example compelling because most people would prefer to know that their partner was cheating on them, if they could so choose, rather than maintain the blissful false belief to the contrary.
I think this is pretty true. I think "deep skepticism" is vastly overrated. It is easy to live in a nice house, in a first-world country, with your pick of luxuries, and wax philosophical about how we can doubt everything we believe. Someone needs to be living in a hole, with nothing, before they can truly be said to have embraced infinite doubt. Who among us truly lives as a solipsist?
However, I do not conclude from this that we must assume something like solipsism could not possibly be true. I would just conclude that we should not afford much importance to its possible truth.
This is not what the is-ought gap establishes. Maybe you should go into your reasoning a little more here.
Wrapping up this post, let's return to verificationism about truth once more. This is a tangentially related epistemology argument, so I thought I'd put at the bottom. Let us focus our lens on the concept of verification itself. When we speak of verifying something, we speak of confirming it to be true. What does this mean? What is the difference between something which is truly confirmed, and something which we are merely justified in believing?
It seems intuitive that if we have genuinely confirmed that something is true, we know it to be the case. In fact, you claim that what is true is limited by what we can know. This raises the question: what can we know? There are two ways to take this question. One is methodological:
"How do we know that we are not mistaken in thinking we know X?"
One is definitional:
"What conditions would a person have to satisfy for them to have knowledge of X?"
The latter is my question to you. If what can be true is constrained by what we can know, then before we ask what is true, we ought to ask what we can know. Before we know what we can know, we must know what it is to know at all. So, what conditions does a person have to satisfy to have knowledge of X?
I've self-published on the internet already (link in my user profile), but I've yet to confirm that a single person has even read the entire thing, so I'm really lacking in confidence that anyone would want to pay to read it, when they won't even read it for free.
Quoting Tarrasque
One of the reasons I ended up doing this systemic approach was because it seems one can't argue for one position in one subtopic without bringing up other subtopics. This thread is just about philosophy of language, specifically moral language, but we've already had to shy away from tangents leading off into philosophy of mind, will, ontology, and of course other, more normative fields of ethics. Everything has implications on everything else, and when studying everything I found those implications traced down to a few core principles. So I start with the reasons to adopt those few core principles instead of others, and then explore the implications of those on everything else, since if I started in any one place I'd end up tracing it back to those principles which in turn would raise a bunch of "but what about this other field then" questions anyway.
Tomorrow is my birthday and I'm going out of town for it, so I probably won't have time to reply to the rest of this until Sunday. Looking forward to it.
Who's this 'we' and from where are you getting your assessment of usually? I certainly don't, and neither do any of my colleagues. We wouldn't get very far understanding the role of things like social influence or group identity if we just presumed everyone meant exactly what they said. If someone after work tells you the would 'kill for a beer' are you concerned for their sanity, or do you presume they didn't literally mean what they said?
Quoting Tarrasque
And we have plenty of them. People have been studying this for hundreds of years, we're not coming to it fresh just now. Have you read the works of any expressivist philosophers? What is it that you think the pages are full of if not reasons? Are they to you just a series of blank pages with ",,,and therefore expressivism" at the end?
Quoting Tarrasque
That's begging the question. Their surface level speech already matches what they claim it means, that's why they claim it means it. Why would they match their surface level speech to what cognitivists claim it means? If "You shouldn't murder" means "Boo Murder!", then the expressivist has nothing to change in their surface level speech, "You shouldn't murder" means exactly what they intend it to.
Quoting Tarrasque
Just mentioning the name of a problem doesn't really help anyone understand why you think it's applicable. Do you think expressivist philosophers are unaware of the Frege-Geach problem? If not, then presumably they don't think it makes their position less tenable, and they presumably have their reasons. So what's relevant here is not merely the existence of a reason to find their position untenable, it's why you find that reason compelling.
Quoting Tarrasque
Again, you're just making an assumption that the manner of speech dictates how the world is. when someone is determining whether the leaf is green, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is barely involved, neither is the insular cortex. Both are heavily involved in judging something like murder being wrong. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is responsible for regulation of emotional affect and the insular cortex is involved in feelings of disgust and visceral somatosensation. If the question "is murder wrong" was like the question "is the leaf green" then why would completely different brain regions be involved? So we can presume it's not. So why would we presume now that it's grammatical structure had the same meaning? When determining whether to murder someone (or commit some other immoral act) one does not consult one's database of actions to see what property this particular one has attached to it, one consults a wide variety of emotional responses. So, if that's what's actually happening when we make moral choices, then why would our moral talk be all about assigning properties to behaviours, properties which are barely consulted when they consider one of those behaviours?
Clearly your experience differs from mine here. My experience with people discussing morality usually consists in them putting forward claims, like "abortion should be permissible," and supporting their position with reasoned arguments. It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions.
Yes, proponents of expressivism provide pages of considered arguments for expressivism. This is just like how proponents of cognitivism provide pages of considered arguments for cognitivism, proponents of quasi-realism provide pages of considered arguments for quasi-realism...
Pretty much every theory in philosophy has "pages full of reasons" in support of it. I can't believe every theory at once. I could suspend judgement until I have read every book arguing for or against a position, but that would leave me unproductively agnostic on many things.
I've already talked about the Frege-Geach problem and why I find it convincing earlier in this thread. It came up in reference to Pfhorrest's prescriptivism.
No, I don't think expressivist philosophers are unaware of it. Nor do I think they find it insignificant: as far as I'm aware, every noncognitivist theory at least attempts resolution of embedding problems, including the Frege-Geach problem. Some people think these attempts succeed, others think that they fail.
Is there any particular literature on expressivism you recommend?
So, emotional areas in our brain are more active when we make moral judgments. People certainly have moral sentiments. No cognitivist would deny that. Is the fact that people react more strongly when judging murder than when judging a leaf surprising? People care far more about wrongness than they do about greenness.
Emotional responses and deliberative thought both play roles in deciding what actions we take. What do you make of people who claim to employ reason in moral decision-making?
Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!
Quoting Tarrasque
Right. So your claim that we should treat moral claims as they appear to be until we have reason not to is irrelevant. We already have reasons not to. What we ought to be discussing is the weight of those reasons, the degree to which you find them compelling.
Quoting Tarrasque
Again, so the mere existence of these counter-arguments is irrelevant, as is the mere existence of your reasons. The relevant issue is why you find them compelling.
Quoting Tarrasque
Moral decision-making is extremely complex. Some things we know almost for sure are that...
1) Decisions which we call 'moral' ones are actually a very wide range of decision-types involving (sometimes very different) areas of the brain. I'm loathe to make absolute statements, but one I think I could stand by is that moral decision-making definitely is not one unified thing. It is several disparate and possibly even mutually exclusive processes depending on the exact nature of the decision. we do not involve the same process in deciding to care for a baby as we do in deciding to give to charity.
2) The processes used for for any given decision-type vary across people, ages and circumstance. At any given time a decision might be made on the basis or norm-following, rules, consequences, emotion, empathy... At any given time this decision might be something we're consciously aware of, or something we're process sub-consciously.
So the answer to your question is - I'm sure they do...sometimes.
I'm not quite that optimistic! We haven't even resolved the dispute about vaccines, or the dispute about flat earth.
"The range of moral criticism, as most people understand it, is broad. Various forms of behaviour, such as premarital sex, homosexuality, idleness, and wastefulness, are often considered immoral even though they do not harm other people or violate any duties to them."
-Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other
I agree with your assessment. There are many unrelated topics that we ascribe moral value(or disvalue) to. It is not surprising that the decision-making processes we employ are diverse, given the scope of what we consider to be "moral decisions."
I agree with this. What winds up making our choices, at the end of the day, is variable. At least some of the time, though, we make decisions based on reasons. These well-considered decisions are often better decisions.
Then whence the notion "It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions."? It seems like an impasse, and you were previously imploring that we treat things the way they seem to be until we have good reason to believe otherwise.
Quoting Tarrasque
Do you have any reason to believe this?
Perhaps I should have said moral disagreement is not at more of an impasse than disagreement about things we all agree are matters of fact. On the individual level, views on issues like abortion are changed. There are also people at metaethical impasses, but this alone does not push us to conclude that discussion about metaethics is noncognitive. If you thought this, you wouldn't talk about "reasons for believing expressivism" at all. "There are pages full of reasons for expressivism" would just be you expressing "Woo, expressivism!"
Do I have any reason to believe that well-considered decisions are often better decisions?
Well, a reason is a consideration in favor of X. If, after deliberation, I conclude that X is what has the most/strongest considerations in favor of it, this is what I think I have the most reason to do. This means that I think it's the best thing to do. You're asking me, right now, to consider my reasons for a belief. You think I've reached the wrong conclusion about what the most reasonable thing to believe is, right? You implore me to review my beliefs by exposing them to compelling arguments. Are more well-reasoned arguments likely better arguments? Are well-reasoned positions often better positions? If so, why not believe that well-reasoned decisions are often better decisions?
Really? If that's how you see it I'm not going to argue with you about it, but it seems odd to me. I can't think if a single moral fact that everyone agrees on, and not many that are agreed even by a large majority. I can say, however, that virtually everyone in the world agrees on the physical properties of tables, or the physical functioning of a cup. That solid things cannot pass through other solid things, that large objects do not fit inside smaller ones...etc.
Quoting Tarrasque
Indeed, a fact that in no way tells us the method by which they are changed.
Quoting Tarrasque
You're mistaking "pages full of reasons" with "pages full of reasons which I agree with". That's the entire point I'm making. Both you (and Pfhorrest earlier) seemed to be implying that reasons (the mere existence of them) could be somehow put into some global accounting system and out pops the 'right' way of looking at things. By saying that expressivist philosophers have "pages of reasons" I'm just trying to show that their mere existence doesn't get us anywhere.
All of our epistemic peers have reasons which seem coherent and logical to them. The activity we're involved in is choosing between them. We can't cite the existence of reasons as an explanation of our choice (all options have those). That's all I meant. I'm not advocating expressivism.
Quoting Tarrasque
I'm not imploring you to think anything, nor do I think you've reached the wrong conclusion about what the most reasonable thing to believe is. I'm interested in how you come to believe (and defend) whatever it is you believe. To answer your question though - I think more well-reasoned arguments are better arguments by definition. The measure we usually use to determine 'better' when it come to arguments is the the quality of the reasoning (a subjective judgement, I might add, but nonetheless the case). Decisions, however, are not usually judged 'better' on the strength of their reasons, they're usually judged on the evaluation of their outcome, so the two are different. It's like saying "tasty cakes are usually better cakes, so why not believe tasty computers are better computers".
You raise a good point. There are facts about physical reality that are extremely basic, agreed upon by practically everyone. There are also physical matters-of-fact that are much more contentious. Likewise, there are moral facts that enjoy the agreement of a vast majority: that torturing someone for absolutely no reason other than personal pleasure is wrong, for instance, or that committing genocide is worse than donating to charity. The consensus may not be as high as our most basic physical intuitions, but I'd bet you it's close.
What are some arguments against, say, cognitivism, that you'd like to see me respond to?
Funnily enough, I don't think that quality of reasoning is subjective.
Evaluating the outcome of a decision is reasoning about it.
Buying a thousand lottery tickets is a poorly reasoned decision. It is a gamble which has an incredibly small chance of resulting in your desired outcome. Perhaps one of your tickets is a winner. You win more than enough to compensate what you spent on tickets. Do we judge your decision as good, based on the outcome? Or was it poor, based on the reasoning? Would you repeat your decision if you had the opportunity to buy a thousand tickets for the next lottery? Would you recommend that your friends and family do the same?
I don't see any widespread agreement on those matters. Torturing someone for no reason, is just definitional,what distinguishes actions (the things to which the term 'moral' applies) are those reasons,and it's that matter over which there's so little agreement. The question we actually have to answer is "is torturing this person in this circumstance, moral". The answer to that question will not yield much agreement and disagreement will hinge on those 'reasons'.
Quoting Tarrasque
I think im going through some of them already, so I'm already getting the answers I'm looking for, thanks.
Quoting Tarrasque
No, I suspected not. Perhaps that's for another day though.
Quoting Tarrasque
It is, but the evaluation includes the outcome in a way that evaluation of arguments doesn't.
To take your lottery example. Imagine you bought those thousand rickets and won a thousand times, you do the same next week and again the week after, the same thing happens. Is it still a bad decision, simply because it 'ought to be' on the basis of the evidence? Clearly the success of the outcome must cause us to review our assessment of the decision, we must have got something wrong somewhere.
In addition, what we believe are reasoned decisions are very often not. Even High Court Judges hand down longer sentences when they're hungry than they do when they're not. 'Reasoning' is often used just to bolster the authority of a decision made with very little prior thought.
I said "torturing someone for no reason other than personal pleasure."
Consider, "murder is wrong." Since "murder" means "unjustified killing," it seems almost trivial, since you would say that what matters is whether or not people agree that a given killing is murder. While people might disagree about whether a given killing is in fact sufficiently justified, they agree that if it is unjustified, it is wrong. There seems to be a need for killing to be reasonably justified in a way that we don't need to justify, say, going for a walk.
"The success of the outcome causing us to review our assessment of the decision" is reasoning. If it seems that I can consistently win lotteries, entering lotteries might appear more reasonable. Remember, I did not say that reasoning makes a decision better. I said that more well-reasoned decisions are likely or often better decisions. I might make a well-reasoned decision to go to the bank today, and then get struck by lightning the moment I step out the door. This would be a terrible outcome, but this doesn't mean my decision to go to the bank was not likely to have a good outcome. Its likelihood to have a good outcome was probably a large part of what made it seem to be a good decision.
But past probabilities do not affect future probabilities. In considering the lottery, none of my past wins indicate a heightened probability of a future win. This is just like how, in a series of a hundred coin flips, getting tails 99 times does not mean there is more than a 50% chance my next flip will be heads.
The exception would be if I have been winning the lottery due to a reliable cause, like a "guardian angel" arranging that I will usually get a winning ticket. If I have reason to believe I have such a guardian angel, I may always have reason to buy another ticket. Otherwise, no matter how many times I have won in the past, buying another ticket is always a bad decision.
I'm sure this is the case. I don't think human beings are flawless automatons of reason. People often take themselves to have a reason to do or believe something, and then later realize they were mistaken. Sometimes, they never realize they were mistaken at all.
If you do want to get into this, define what you mean by "subjective" and explain how you think it applies to reasoning.
I see what you mean. I wouldn't call that moral agreement because I'm seeing the justification to be the meat of any moral dilemma, not the need for it. I don't know if I've mentioned it here or in another thread (there's a few 'morality' threads on the go at once), but I think it's quite irrefutable that most people are either born with, or are predisposed to develop, a basic set of what we might call moral imperatives. We sense other's pain and try to minimise it, we sense other's intentions a try to help and we are drawn to to other people who appear to act the same. The problem I have with deriving any moral realism from these facts is that it ends up saying nothing at all about actual moral dilemmas as they appear to us. To me, a moral dilemma is only a dilemma because the answer is not delivered to us automatically by those same set of basic instincts.
Quoting Tarrasque
Yes, but we were talking about prior reasoning - determining the 'best' decision prior to being apprised of the outcome.
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Right. So how is reasoning delivering us probabilities? If, as you say "past probabilities do not affect future probabilities" then we're not simply using frequentist probabilities, we must be using Bayes. How do you imagine reasoning actually working here - step-by-step what does it do, do you think? Say I'm trying to decide whether to wear my coat The weather report says it's going to rain, but the sky looks clear and blue. I decide not to wear my coat and enjoy a sunny day without the extra burden. Was my decision right or wrong? How do I judge the quality of my reasoning prior to knowing the outcome?
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So, the point here is that we'd never know. A moral system based on reasoning would be completely indistinguishable from one based on gut feeling because we'd have absolutely no way of telling if the reasoning is post hoc rationalisation of what we we're going to do anyway, or genuine reasoning. what I find disturbing about all these "I've worked out how to decide what's moral or not" type of models (we seem to get a half dozen of them every week) is that they try to add a gloss of authority to moral resolutions which we have absolutely no way of distinguishing from gut feeling (or worse, political ideology). The mere fact that they can be parsed into some rational algorithm doesn't distinguish them because the real meat of moral dilemmas are sufficiently complex that any decision could be similarly parsed.
The judges don't agree they're influenced by hunger by the way, they all think they're the exception.
I totally agree. Humans have innate moral sensibilities. We often perceive something, and without more than a thought about it, we will judge it as right or wrong. Humans are not unique in this regard. I've seen studies implying that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness, and will freak out if they're rewarded worse than another chimp doing the same task as them.
Gravity is another thing that humans have innate sensibilities about. We've always known that if something goes up, it must come down. If a rock is falling, we ought to get out of the way. Our intuitions about gravity are reliable, but not always. We weren't doing exact calculations until we had theories. We can say the same about mathematics. We could count objects, find symmetry in the face of a partner, divide things into groups - without theories of mathematics.
The fact that a crude evaluative mechanism for some subject has arisen biologically within us does not mean that there is no truth to be found in that subject.
Our moral questions are more complicated today. If people encountered a man amidst a field of fresh corpses, bashing in skulls with a rock, holding a baby upside down by the leg, they might ask what he was doing. If he replied that he was killing people purely because he felt like it, for no reason other than his own pleasure, who among the spectators would not judge him as wrong automatically? In such a case, I believe the consensus would be as good as unanimous. Do you think it'd be a less certain consensus than those about physical intuitions?
Reasoning consists in weighing the considerations for and against a given action or belief. Everybody reasons about things at least some of the time. How do you imagine that "judging" the quality of reasoning works? Would you say it's just looking at how it worked out for you after the fact?
Imagine someone who regularly takes unfavorable risks, is inconsistent, and barely thinks about anything at all before he does it. When he achieves his aims, it's pure luck. But, as it turns out, he gets lucky a lot. Is a person like this a good decision-maker? Should he be in a leadership role, or working as a consultant?
I don't deny that the outcome is important. If I left my jacket and it's sunny, I'm happy with the outcome! If I left my jacket and it rains, I am not happy. When I'm standing there wet, I might think that I made a bad decision to leave my jacket at home. This could be a psychological trick: think the poker player who goes all-in on an incredible hand and unluckily loses. He might think he made a bad decision, but did he really? If he has the same hand again, all else being equal, he should go all-in again. He made the best decision he could with the information he had available. A good decision can result in a bad outcome, and a bad decision can result in a good outcome.
Couldn't you say the same about math, or logic? At the end of the day, we only believe that the Law of Non-Contradiction is true because we really, deep down, feel like it's true. Are we just post-hoc rationalizing our gut feeling? Perhaps, but this isn't obvious.
We could even say the same about our physical intuitions. Deep down, I feel like it's true that larger objects can't fit inside smaller ones. But how do I know? I haven't tried to fit every object in the universe inside every other. What if I met someone who claimed otherwise?
Have you read much moral philosophy?
Given your concerns about reasoning, I'd like to introduce you to the concept of "reflective equilibrium." This is the idea that the beliefs we are most justified in holding are the ones that have, upon the most reflection, remained consistent. Reasoning is done by comparing "seemings," or "things that seem to be the case." These seemings are defeasible: a less convincing seeming is often discarded in favor of a more convincing one.
The bedrock of this system are those seemings which, after the most reflection(which consists in examining seemings and comparing seemings), are the most stable. Take your example that larger objects cannot fit inside smaller ones. This seeming has been consistent with everything you have ever experienced in your life. Not only this, but it seems intuitively true based on what "larger" and "smaller" mean. I'm sure that the more you consider it, the more sure you are of it. What would it take to defeat this seeming?
The more we consider our seemings, the more we approach reflective equilibrium. We do this in our own minds, and we do it with other people dialogically. The most important thing to remember is that we could always be wrong. As you rightly point out, reasoning is fallible. It falls back on judgment. But, this alone should not discourage us from our pursuit of truth.
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Intentions, as I mean them, are "second-order desires", in the same way that beliefs are "second-order perceptions", though neither in quite so straightforward a way, hence the quotes here. "Thoughts" in general (beliefs and intentions) are, on my account, what happens when we turn our awareness and control inward, look at our "feelings" (desires and perceptions) and then judge whether they are correct or not. To think something is good and to intend it are thus synonymous: the thing that you think is good, that you intend, is the thing that you judge it would be correct for you to desire.
You still might nevertheless not desire it, just like disbelieving an illusion doesn't make you not perceive it, but just as believing is thinking something is true, intending is thinking something is good, which is different from just desiring it (feeling like it's good), just as belief is different from perception (feeling like it's true).
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The distinction here is between a general evaluation of the goodness of going to the gym, and the goodness of you in particular going to the gym right now in particular. You can intend to regularly go to the gym, think it's good for you to do so, but because your kid just broke a leg and needs to be taken to the hospital, intend not to go to the gym right now, because you think it would be bad if you went to the gym right now instead of taking your kid to the hospital.
Just like how saying "it's true that horses have four legs" means it's generally true that usually horses have four legs, but that doesn't mean some particular horse cannot only have three legs. Sometimes it's false that some horse has four legs.
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An MRI is a third person description of you, not your own first-person experience. Completely regardless of what a third-person description of the mechanics underlying someone's experience of pain, their first-person experience of that pain is what moral judgements are to be measured against. (And NB that "X will hurt" isn't the meaning of "X is bad" on my account; the meaning is something more like "avoid X". Whether it hurts anyone is just part of the criteria to use for judging whether or not to agree to avoid X, to agree that X is bad, just like empirical sensations are the criteria to use for judging whether or not to agree that something is descriptively true).
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This isn't really acknowledging the distinction between experiences and feelings, which is crucial to my account. Experiences aren't propositional; you don't experience that something is true or that something is good. "I am hungry" doesn't directly entail "I ought to be fed"; rather, feeding me is merely one thing that can result in satisfying my hunger. Anything else that could satisfy my hunger would equally suffice; say, some caffeine, which suppresses hunger. In contrast, bloodlust is specifically a desire for someone to hurt, it has propositional content, a particular state of affairs in mind. That state of affairs doesn't have to be realized, on my account, but the experiences in response to which someone desires that state of affairs does, somehow, without disregarding others', to bring about a universally good state of affairs.
(Of course, we'll always fall short of universally good, just like we'll always fall short of universally true belief, but the procedures for how to deal with those shortcomings are topics about epistemology and a part of what's usually considered normative ethics, which I'm planning later threads about; they're not necessary just to talk about what things mean).
It's the blind men and the elephant again. The tail-guy's perception of a rope doesn't have to be satisfied for a universally true description of what they're feeling, but the sensations he has that inspire him to perceive a rope do need to be satisfied: to be true, the answer "it's an elephant" needs to account for why tail-guy perceives something rope-like, and thankfully it does.
Likewise the sadist's bloodlust, his desire to kill, doesn't have to be satisfied for a universally good prescription, but his appetites, the experiences that inspire him to desire to kill, do need to be satisfied, somehow, or else there is still some bad going unresolved, some suffering that he is undergoing without respite. That satisfaction could involve some other outlet, some kind of medication, some other therapy, something, but it doesn't have to (and of course shouldn't) involve him actually killing people.
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Is there actually an elephant, when there is no possibility in principle of anybody ever telling that there is one instead of e.g. a rope? Bearing in mind that if there is no way in principle of them communicating with each other or anything they have mutual access to, then on what grounds could you say they even exist together in the same world? When we imagine this, we're imagining that you and I have some kind of privileged access where we're aware of all three of them and of the elephant, but they're all absolutely blocked off from awareness of each other or of any part of the elephant besides their tiny little bit. But if we can interact with them (to observe them), and with the whole of the elephant (to observe it), then in principle there is a communication channel, through us, by which they could observe each other and the whole of the elephant. You can't really seal parts of the universe off from each other completely like that, without effectively removing them from each other's universes, separating them into separate bubble worlds, in which case why couldn't different things be true in different worlds?
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All linguistic meaning is inferred by the audience about the speaker. If you read the bugs as words and not just as bugs, you're already reading them as though they are an utterance by some speaker. What kind of utterance you interpret them as determines how and whether you will evaluate the truth (in the broad sense, i.e. correctness) of them. Actual speakers use words that have agreed-upon meaning in the linguistic community to try to convey various meanings to their audience, but it's always up to the audience what meaning they will take away from it. If there is no actual speaker (or writer, etc) at all, then there is no actual meaning being conveyed in the first place. If an audience nevertheless reads in meaning to something that's actually meaningless (like a random pattern of dead bugs), it's up to the audience to read in what their imaginary speaker meant to convey by their message.
E.g. if the dead bugs say "I don't like your hat", but there isn't actually anybody who doesn't like anyone's hat who wrote that, the dead bugs just look like that sentence, what meaning should a reader take away from it? Who should they feel insulted by? Nobody, because nobody actually wrote that.
Quoting Tarrasque
Sure, if they take Moore's sentence to mean "I believe X but I don't believe X" or "X is true but X is false" or something like that, then they can take it to be contradictory. My account of impression/expression is an account of why it seems like it shouldn't seem contradictory, but nevertheless it does seem contradictory, i.e. why this is a "paradox" and not just an obvious either contradiction or non-contradiction. Someone who took Moore's sentence to mean one of the things above wouldn't see anything paradoxical about it, but people generally do, so some explanation of the differences and relations in meaning between "I believe X" and "X is true" is needed to account for why they do.
Quoting Tarrasque
Remember that "be(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". Likewise "is(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-is-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". These are meant to be equivalent to "x ought to be F" and "x is F"; we're just pulling the "is"-ness and "ought"-ness out into functions that we apply to the same object, the same state of affairs, "x being F".
So if "if x ought to be F, then..." is no problem, then "if be(x being F), then ..." should be no problem either, because the latter is just an encoding of the former in a formal language meant to elucidate the relations between "is" and "ought" statements about the same state of affairs.
I only use the imperative form of the copula, "be", to name that function, because I take "oughts" to be a kind of generalization of imperatives: "you ought to F" and "you, F!" are equivalent on my account, but you can say things of the form "x ought to be G" that can't be put into normal imperative form. "Oughts" are more like exhortations than imperatives: "Saints be praised!" isn't an order to the saints to go get praised, but it is basically the same as a general imperative to everyone (but nobody in particular) to "praise the saints!" and also basically the same as "the saints ought to be praised", which likewise implies that everybody (but nobody in particular) ought to "praise the saints!"
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Perhaps we could more neutrally distinguish them as "cognitive truth" and "descriptive truth", since the most important feature of my moral semantics is rejecting descriptivism without rejecting cognitivism. On my account moral claims are "truth-apt" in the sense that matters for cognitivism, but not "not truth-apt" in the sense that matters for descriptivism. They're not telling you something about the way the world is, but they are nevertheless fit to be assigned yes/no, correct/incorrect, 1/0, "truth" values.
The particular words used to distinguish these two concepts don't really matter to me at all, just that they are distinguished, and not conflated together: that not only descriptions are taken to be apt to bear the kind of boolean values needed to do logic to them.
Quoting Tarrasque
I would state the parallel principles instead as:
"X is descriptively true if and only if X satisfies all sensations / observations"
and
"X is prescriptively good if and only if X satisfies all appetites".
Claims that something is descriptively true or that something prescriptively good can both be "cognitively true" / correct in the same way, they can both carry boolean values that can be processed through logical functions.
But this is getting away from mere philosophy of language; I almost went into a huge multi-paragraph thing about epistemology and the ethical equivalent thereof here.
The meanings, on my account, of ordinary non-moral claims, and moral claims, respectively, are to impress upon the audience either a "belief", an opinion that something is (descriptively) true, that it is, that reality is some way; or an "intention", an opinion that something is (prescriptively) good, that it ought to be, that morality is some way.
It's technically a different question as to what kinds of states of affairs can be real or can be moral, and then a further question still as to how we sort out which of such states of affairs actually is real or moral to the best of our limited abilities. Those are topics I intend to have later threads about: ontology and epistemology, and two halves of what's usually reckoned as normative ethics which I term "teleology" and "deontology".
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The difference is that I'm not claiming "X is wrong" describes some kind of abstract moral property of wrongness of object X, and that on account of that property, we ought not to do X. I claim that "X is wrong" just means "X ought not happen", which in turn is a more general, universal form of sentences like "(everybody) don't do X" or "let X not happen!"
Quoting Tarrasque
This seems related to the black hole information paradox. The edge of the universe is the cosmic event horizon. It was a problem that information could seem to be lost when falling across a black hole event horizon. If it had been actually lost, then so far as I know, just like particles actually having no definite position, the universe would actually be indeterminate about that state of affairs. If the universe has any information about some state of affairs, if that state of affairs actually exists, then it will have some impact on something about the universe; and even if we're not technologically capable of reconstructing the information from that impact, that information has nevertheless reached us in the form of that impact.
That black hole information paradox got solved in a way that the information wasn't actually lost, because the infalling particles have effects on the stuff happening right at the event horizon, which does eventually bring the information back to us in the form of Hawking radiation. It seems like lightspeed particles moving away from us at the edge of the universe could have some impact on the other stuff there at the edge of the universe that is still capable of communicating with us, and so information about that escaping stuff could still make its way back to us in principle.
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I have a whole thing about the contingent facts about definitions (and, hence, analytic a posteriori facts) that I'm going to do a later thread about.
Quoting Tarrasque
I plan to do a later thread on this topic, so I'll defer answering until then.
Happy birthday!
I think this is a plausible enough account. I don't find it strikingly more plausible than moral opinions just being beliefs, but it works well on its own terms.
Just as beliefs could be described as perceptions about our perceptions, intentions could be described as desires about our desires. Is something like this what you are implying?
It's not clear that an ability to communicate is a necessary feature of conscious beings. I don't find it problematic to imagine a single world that contains three beings who cannot communicate with each other. A conscious being could have no ability to manipulate its own body, for instance.
I certainly wasn't imagining this. I was imagining three men and an elephant, not myself watching three men and an elephant. When we stipulate a hypothetical, just "what if X," it's not required that we assume we are there watching X. I can cogently say "let's assume a hypothetical world where neither of us exist." We couldn't possibly be in such a scenario to observe ourselves. We can still talk about what might be the case if it were true.
I don't think you have sufficient grounds to claim that three beings who cannot communicate must therefore be in different worlds.
Yes, I agree with this. Of course, if they interpret the sentence as expressive, impressive, descriptive, imperative, whatever, this will change if and how they will truth-evaluate the sentence.
I see. We're in agreement here.
By your account of what "if x ought to be F, then..." means, it is just as problematic as "if be(x being F)." Like you say, they are equivalent in meaning.
The problem is arising due to you interpreting all moral statements as prescriptions.
This is still running into the Frege-Geach problem.
P1. The saints ought to be praised.
P2. If the saints ought to be praised, then the demons ought not to be praised.
C. The demons ought not to be praised.
An exhortation is "an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something."
An imperative is "an authoritative command."
The important thing about both of these is that the semantic content of them is, necessarily, an urging. The fact that you class "the saints ought to be praised" as an exhortation means that, by speaking it in P1, I am necessarily urging that the saints be praised. However in P2, I say the same words as in P1, but I don't urge that the saints be praised or not praised. So, it seems that when I say "the saints ought to be praised," the content of my sentence cannot necessarily be any kind of imperative if we want moral modus ponens to work.
This is a problem that typical cognitivists, who would classify "the saints ought to be praised" as a claim purporting to report a fact, do not encounter.
Sure, that's better. I like the new terminology more.
I'll remember this. My main discomfort with it is the conflation of ontology with epistemology, "what we can know" and "what is" becoming the same concepts. But, we're already discussing that as we discuss verificationism.
If the meaning of regular descriptive claims has to to impress a belief, this seems like it will subject non-moral modus ponens to the Frege-Geach problem as well.
I'll see you there, then.
The is-ought distinction isn't an inherent problem with deriving moral claims from properties. For example, the following deduction respects the is-ought gap:
P1. X is painful.
P2. If X is painful, then we ought to avoid X.
C. We ought to avoid X.
A view espousing the above might be vulnerable to the Open Question Argument, but because it includes a normative premise, it's not an issue with the is-ought gap. For a non-naturalist or non-reductionist, the property of interest isn't pain, it just is "wrongness." So, a non-naturalist deduction might look like:
P1. X is wrong.
P2. If X is wrong, then we ought not to X.
C. We ought not to X.
So yes, there is a difference between your account and a realist account. But, this difference has no effect on the relevance of the is-ought distinction.
Yeah, I suppose that could be. In that sense, every bit of matter present at the big bang could be said to have some residual effect on us. It's still possible that such an effect could be so miniscule or hard to measure that attempts to do so would require more energy than there is in the universe, or something like that. Such effects would be unverifiable in principle, but I expect that in such a case, you would say that they were literally indeterminate.
Is all this information already written in your book?
Depends what you mean by 'truth'. A whole other argument.
Quoting Tarrasque
I think most people would (quite rightly) judge him 'ill', not 'wrong'. That's the point I was making about intuitive feelings of morally apt behaviour. They're just not relevant to actual moral dilemmas about which there's disagreement. The kind these 'moral systems' are aimed at. People supporting moral realism always seem to cite the agreement that would be had over some over-the-top act of evil, but ask yourself why have you had to choose such an example, and when was the last time you faced such a moral dilemma ("should I bash the people's skulls in or not?")? The answer to both will come down to the fact that real moral dilemmas are not solvable by relation to the instincts that we all share about empathy, care, and cooperation.
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Yes, in the long term. I think (after Ramsey) that reasoning is just a mental habit that turns out to be useful.
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Possibly, yes. If it works I cannot see any reason why not. If he gets lucky a lot how are we calculating that it is just luck. If a coin lands on heads most of the time we presume a biased coin, not a lucky one.
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Yes, I suppose you could claim that, but it gets very difficult when it comes to the more advanced areas of maths, logic, and science. You could well argue that assuming the stone follows some physical law when it drops to the ground is just a post hoc rationalisation for my gut feeling that it would, but I don't see how you could argue that the energy level predicted of the Higgs Boson being found where the theory expected it to be was just a post hoc rationalisation of our gut feeling that it would be there.
Quoting Tarrasque
I don't have any disagreement with all this. It's not far off the way I imagine our judgements to be made. None of this defeats relativism (there's nothing about something 'seeming' to one person to be the case, even on reflection, that makes it more likely to actually be the case). Nor does anything here prevent judgements from being post hoc rationalisations (again things will 'seem to be the case' that suit a rational explanation for the actions we've already committed to)
Moral agreement isn't so much an argument for moral realism as it is a counterargument to the argument from moral disagreement. You might claim that people disagreeing about morality gives us reason to think it's relative. A moral realist can point to the disagreement about matters of physical fact(climate change, age of the earth), and the agreement about basic moral fact(child torture, genocide).
Moral realists do not cite these things as arguments in favor of moral realism, but as a reminder to anyone who thinks that mere disagreement entails relativism.
I'm stipulating that it is just luck. This is someone who makes erratic, unconsidered decisions. Due to purely situational luck, he has an excellent track record. Is he a good decision maker?
This is a good point. We don't tend to have intuitions about these high-level concepts beyond "it makes sense" or "it doesn't make sense."
No, it does not defeat relativism. But neither does
"(there's nothing about something 'seeming' to one person to be the case, even on reflection, that makes it more likely to actually be the case)"
imply relativism. Even if my seemings are completely divorced from what is the case, that doesn't entail relativism. It entails that I'm wrong.
Looking at the totality of our decision-making through the lens of reflective equilibrium is helpful to discard the notion that there is anything inherently special about "science experiments" for finding truth. Whether we are judging scientific data or a mathematical proof, its plausibility to us is ultimately filtered through our intuitions. Some people find what they take to be intuitions about moral facts(slavery is wrong!) to be among their most stable seemings. Many people share these same reflective intuitions, about equality, fairness, and justice. Moral theories are seen as more plausible when they explain our foundational moral seemings effectively. While relativism is not "proven" wrong, many realists find that they have just as much justification to believe that slavery is wrong as they do anything else they believe.
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Right. Which is pretty much where we get to.
Moral realists (or 'objectivists') have nothing more to support their claim than "it is not ruled out as an option".
I think parsimony (a principle I find mostly useful), would suggest relativism, as realism needs some objective truth-maker and we don't seem to be able to reach any kind of idea of what that might be. All that happens is the can gets kicked further down the subjective road.
A moral claim is taken to be correct if it somehow 'accounts for' everyone's intuitions - how do we judge if it's 'accounted' for them? Turns out that's just a subjective 'feeling' that it has.
You could if you like think about it in different terms, without really changing anything about it. You could call what I call intentions "moral beliefs", and call desires something like "imperative perceptions", and then talk about "non-moral beliefs" and "non-imperative perceptions", with "belief" and "perception" as the more general terms in place of where I use "thought" and "feeling". Or call perceptions and desires “feelings” as I do, but call all “thoughts” “beliefs” and then separate them into “moral beliefs” and “non-moral beliefs”. I'm really not attached to the language, just the structure of the things named by whatever language. All that matters to me philosophically is that we distinguish the things in these boxes from each other, whatever we decide call them:
Choices of what to call them is a much more superficial matter.
Quoting Tarrasque
Something like it, but not quite exactly, because the second-order opinions ("thoughts") each involve both perceiving and desiring things about first-order opinions, it's just a difference as to which type of first-order opinion the reflexive perception-and-desire is about.
Quoting Tarrasque
This is a matter of principle vs practice again. Anything that can have any causal effect on something else is in principle capable of communicating with it, even if in practice they have no conventional obvious communication ability. (There are some amazing hacks that can get information off of computers not connected to any network, or monitor speech in a room with a computer with no microphone, etc, by using overlooked tiny effects between hardware and software, for example). If two things are causally isolated such that in principle no information about one of them can reach anything that can reach the other one, then from each of their perspectives the other seems not to exist at all, so they’re basically in separate universes.
Quoting Tarrasque
We necessarily imagine from some perspective or another though. If we imagine a world where we don’t exist, we imagine a world that doesn’t contain us as we really are, from some disembodied viewpoint. When we’re imagining the three men and the elephant, we’re imagining it from some viewpoint where we can observe all four of them. But if there isn’t actually any such viewpoint possible, because they’re all so completely isolated from each other, then all we should be imagining is each of their separate viewpoints, from which none of the others can ever seem to exist, nor the whole elephant, so what would it mean to claim that those things do exist, in some way that will never make any noticeable difference to anyone?
Quoting Tarrasque
Conditional imperatives make perfect sense. It helps to remember that material implication is equivalent to a kind of disjunction: “if P then Q” is exactly equivalent to “Q or not P”. I can easily command someone to do Q or not do P, which is the logical equivalent of ordering them to do Q if they do P, or “if you do P, do Q”, without any kind of embedding trouble. It might look like there should be in the “if-then” form, but there’s clearly none in the “or” form which is identical to it.
It might also help to resolve the appearance of the problem if we factor the “be()” out to the whole conditional at once:
be(the saints being praised only if the demons being not praised)
or
be(the demons being not praised or the saints being not praised)
Quoting Tarrasque
If that were a problem, then every account of what people are doing with words would be subject to the same problem. If you take an ordinary indicative sentence to be reporting a fact, as you say, that’s still doing something, but in the antecedent of a conditional is it still doing that same fact-reporting? Whatever solution allows ordinary conditionals to work there, it should also work for whatever else other kinds of speech are doing, so long as there is a “truth-value” that can be assigned to that kind of speech, i.e. each such utterance is either a correct or incorrect utterance of that kind.
Quoting Tarrasque
Yes. I used to be doing a series of threads asking people to review chapters of the book itself, but a mod asked me to stop that as too self-promotional. So instead, at their suggestion, I'm just starting discussions about the ideas (that I've already written about) that I expect will be new to people (and skipping over the things that I expect will be old hat and just rehash arguments everyone has had a zillion times).
You're stretching the ideas of "communication" and "information" too broadly to justify this. We could be dealing with conscious beings that have no bodily control and just float around non-autonomously. If there are no causal links between a being's thoughts and some capacity for action, it cannot communicate in principle. People in completely vegetative states are like this. You could imagine a being who is like a vegetative human, but still aware. Everyone on the planet could be this way. If two conscious, sedentary buoys bump into each other carried atop the tides, they have not just communicated. At least, no more than me being hit by a bus while the driver is asleep at the wheel is me communicating with the bus driver.
No, this is not necessarily the case. We can say "let's imagine a world where we don't exist, in any form, whatsoever. In such a world, my mother would have only three kids, the high school I attended would have one less student..." etc. The idea that we need to stipulate some kind of omniscient observer to talk about counterfactual situations is a unique proposition of your theory. I don't see any reason why it must be true.
"so what would it mean to claim that those things do exist, in some way that will never make any noticeable difference to anyone?"
It means precisely that. That they exist, but in a way that will never make any noticeable difference to anyone. Do you think that if no people existed to make empirical measurements of things, nothing would exist?
"If there is a beer, then get me one" makes sense, while "If get me a beer, then there is a beer" does not and might as well be gibberish. The disjunctive form of the latter is "There is a beer or not get me a beer." I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that conditional imperatives make "perfect sense."
"If the saints ought to be praised, then the demons ought not to be praised" does not seem equivalent to "if you praise the saints, then don't praise the demons." "You praise the saints" could be true while "the saints ought to be praised" is false.
If you still don't see how the Frege-Geach problem presents a challenge to the idea that moral statements are inherently imperative, I'll just leave you with an article that covers the problem and the solutions that have been attempted for it. Considering that you aren't super familiar with this problem, and it is oft considered the predominant challenge for views like yours, I'd suggest that you get more acquainted with it than just talking to me about it.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#EmbPro
Yes, embedded truth-apt propositions are still in the business of reporting fact: that is, being evaluable as true or false and having no other baggage necessarily attached to them. What you are working with here appears to be a sort of "hybrid theory" solution to the problem. You accept that moral propositions are truth-apt. The easiest way to avoid the Frege-Geach problem for you is just to drop the necessary imperativity of moral utterances. "The saints being praised" could be truth-apt in the way relevant to your view(satisfies all appetites or doesn't), while not being an imperative at all. You could explain moral utterances with a kind of dual-purpose system, where they do whatever is required for truth-aptness(necessary, primary) and also serve as imperatives(contingent, secondary). Where you differ from traditional cognitivists is that they would hold that necessary, primary characteristic which establishes truth-aptitude could only be descriptivity.
This is far more plausible than the inverse solution, that is, claiming all descriptive sentences to also be some sort of imperative. Some philosophers have tried this, though.
That's certainly not true. Robust moral realists do make positive arguments in favor of realism. Cuneo's The Normative Web and Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons are two well-regarded books that do just that.
You're just not likely to see the cream-of-the-crop of philosophical arguments if you're getting them from a discussion forum rather than from the works of professional philosophers.
If reasoning is subjective, any principle you suggest to support relativism equally supports robust realism.
Anyhow, this notion that there are "no ideas" of what an objective truthmaker for realism could be is related to your misguided claim above that moral realists have no positive arguments. You will realize that this just isn't the case if you read more about metaethics and moral philosophy.
"Moral realists of this sort allow that moral facts are not natural facts, and moral knowledge is not simply of a piece with scientific knowledge, even as they defend the idea that there are moral facts and (at least in principle) moral knowledge. They thus reject the idea that science is the measure and test of all things (Shafer-Landau 2003, Parfit 2011, Scanlon 2014).
Impressed by the plausibility of naturalism, though, many moral realists have tried, in one way or another, to show that the moral facts they are committed to are either themselves natural facts or are at least appropriately compatible with such facts (Boyd 1988, Brink 1989, Railton 1986). If they are right, then naturalism poses no special threat to moral realism."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2)
The problem here is that you keep referring back to judging. Yes, whether or not you think something is true comes down to a "subjective feeling" of whether or not you think it's true. This "subjective feeling" has no bearing on whether or not it actually is true, but it is something we use to assess what seems true. This is necessary to all facts, because all judgment of what is true is done in people's brains. There could be moral facts such that we could never know what they are. A moral claim is not taken to be true in virtue of accounting for everyone's intuitions. Different theories have differing views on what the truthmakers of moral claims are. Accounting for basic intuitions is something that makes certain moral theories seem more plausible. For example, a theory that what is moral is what maximizes the amount of guitars in the world is likely not congruent with anyone's reflective intuitions about morality.
I'm using the terms as they are used in modern physics, for the "in principle" cases. The more colloquial senses of the terms that you seem to want are merely "in practice" cases.
Even communication between your floating blob brains could be facilitated, if for example some alien being came by, read one's mind with super tech scanners, beamed a message about that into another's mind with super tech transmitters, and so on back and forth. So long as communication of information, in the physics sense, is in principle possible, then you could concoct some ludicrous way around whatever ludicrous "but what if they can't talk to each other" scenario.
Quoting Tarrasque
Observers don't have to be humans -- again, using the modern physics sense of the term "observer". If a rock floating through space has "no way of telling" that some other object exists, in that that other object doesn't affect the rock in any way at all, neither directly nor by affecting something else that affects the rock, then that other object cannot meaningfully be said to be in the same universe as the rock -- they are completely causally isolated from each other.
I've kind of lost track of what this subthread has to do with the topic though. It seems like we're talking about ontology and arguments for or against physicalism. Was this just because you reject physicalism and so see no reason to reject moral non-naturalism's non-physical objects?
Quoting Tarrasque
Now you're talking about encoding a different kind of conditional again.
First we had conditionals purely relating hypothetical states of affairs to each other, "x being F implies x being G" style, and that was no problem.
Then you brought up implications between imperatives or moral propositions, "be(x being F) implies be(x being G)" style. I've since explained how that's not a problem.
Now you've brought up implications that are apparently between indicative/descriptive/factual and imperative/prescriptive/moral propositions. I've already addressed this nicely in a post about Forrester's Paradox (the Gentle Murder Problem) before, so I'll just quote that post here:
Quoting Pfhorrest
So "If there is a beer, then get me one" would be encoded as "be it the case that (if there is a beer you get me a beer)", or equivalently "be it the case that (you get me a beer, or there is no beer)", or "be it not the case that (there is a beer and you don't get me a beer)".
Quoting Tarrasque
I'm quite familiar with it already, as I'd hope these ready responses to your objections would demonstrate.
Quoting Tarrasque
Embedded descriptive propositions are not directly reporting the truth of something, though. "If P then Q" does not report that P is the case; rather, it says that, supposing P were the case, it would report that Q was also the case. If it were a problem for the kind of cognitive imperatives or exhortations that I take moral propositions to be, it would also be a problem for descriptions or reports. Whatever it is that an ordinary non-moral proposition does, it's not directly doing that when embedded in a conditional, any more than an imperative or exhortation or anything else does. But we can solve that problem, in a way that works for both cases.
Quoting Tarrasque
I'm not claiming that all descriptive sentences are some kind of imperative. I'm merely bringing a speech-act analysis to indicative sentences. Impression of descriptive opinions is just ordinary non-moral assertion of facts; I'm not saying that that's doing anything different than what it's ordinarily taken to do. The only new things I'm adding to the mix are to say that we don't only express prescriptive feelings ("desires") and impress descriptive thoughts ("beliefs"), we can also express descriptive feelings, and impress prescriptive thoughts. It's turning the linear dichotomy of only expressing feelings about prescriptive matters, and only impressing thoughts about descriptive matters -- the usual divide held by most of the analytic philosophical world -- and breaking it up into a two-dimensional account, where we can have both impressible thoughts and expressible feelings about either descriptive or prescriptive matters. We can think and say things about prescriptive matters in a way just like we think and say things about descriptive matters, without having to reduce the prescriptions to descriptions; just like we can feel and say things about descriptive matters in a way just like we feel and say things about prescriptive matters, without reducing those descriptions to prescriptions.
I'm not really interested in the mere fact that philosophers have made claims in support of moral realism (I took that to be self-evident). If you personally find any of these claims persuasive, I'd be interested to hear why, but the mere fact of their existence is something I already know.
Quoting Tarrasque
Fair enough. I didn't really word that well. I don't mean that there are literally no suggestions. What I meant was that there are none which have met the standard of a shared reality, such as the idea of predictive inference has had as a truth-maker of claims about the physical world - The claim "things appear to fall toward massive objects at a predictable speed" is made true by repeatedly dropping objects and finding them to do exactly that. Almost everyone on earth agrees that this is the truth-maker of such claims, even 6 month old babies adopt beliefs on the basis of repeatable predictive results. It is fundamental to human cognition. A handful of ideas from some philosophers does not even come close.
Quoting Tarrasque
No it isn't. Some facts can be tested to refine the sense we have of them seeming true, others cannot. This is a crucial distinction. It might 'seem' true that the mirage is made of water, I can walk up to it to test this 'seeming' and try to drink from it. If it doesn't behave the way I expect water to behave I discard that 'seeming true' and replace it. Most importantly, everyone else on the planet does the same thing with their 'seemings'. So I can talk to anyone else about what a mirage 'really' is and they'll already agree with me about the process by which I refined my idea about what 'seemed to be true'.
Quoting Tarrasque
Again 'accounting for' is just a subjective judgement which will differ in everyone's mind so it doesn't have any impact on reducing the subjectivity of the moral claim in the first place. This is in contrast to 'predicting an outcome' which reduces the subjectivity of claims about what seems to be the case physically. If I say "It seems to me as if the smaller ball will fall slower than the larger ball", and someone else says "It seems to me as if the larger ball will fall slower than the smaller ball" we can reduce the subjectivity in these different intuitions by dropping the two balls and seeing which one falls fastest. If someone says "abortion is wrong" and someone else says "abortion is not wrong" we cannot reduce this subjectivity by seeing which accounts for all moral intuitions. The first person will say "abortion being wrong seems to account for all moral intuitions" and the second person will say "abortion being not-wrong seems to account for all moral intuitions", nothing has become more objective than their original stances.
Quoting Tarrasque
This is just because we've learnt to use the word 'moral' in the way others use it. We wouldn't use it to describe something which is outside of common use. That doesn't mean we can in any way refine all the things which are inside common use. If anything with four legs and hairy coat is a 'snarf', then we cannot, from our collection of all things which fit that category, determine which of them is really a snarf. They all are, because they all fit the definition.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/factual/papers/HorganNondescriptive.html
That paper (from 2000) isn't the origin of my views, but I knew at one point after coming up with them I came across a paper that sounded very similar to my views, and then lost track of it before I could read it. I'm only 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through this one tonight, but as far as I can tell thus far it sounds exactly like my own views, modulo a few insignificant terminological differences (though @Tarrasque may find them more significant than I do).